I'm a Principal Software Engineer and Engineering Manager in Belfast. For the past ten years, I've built production software across machine learning, computer vision, data streaming, and developer infrastructure.

My current bet is that coding agents have made producing software cheap, while the systems around them have not caught up. I'm building those missing parts in public and testing them on products I actually use.

Website · Experience · LinkedIn

At Terminal Industries, I work on the Digital Twin of the Yard, a live model that joins yard activity, operational records, and shipping documents. My role crosses product engineering, applied ML, distributed systems, infrastructure, and engineering leadership.

• Real-Time Multi-Camera Video Analytics combines detections and identifiers across cameras into an operational view within seconds. My work covers the Kafka event plane, cross-camera fusion, cloud infrastructure, observability, analytics, and technical leadership.
• Mobile Asset Identification turns a phone photo and its location into a yard check-in, check-out, or inventory record. I built the labelled dataset, evaluation benchmark, image analysis service, and AWS infrastructure.
• Intelligent Document Processing turns photographed bills of lading into structured shipment data for gate verification. I owned the research, domain model, dataset, evaluation, and production integration.

• Work Graph replaces the flat project board with a dependency graph that people and agents can share. It tracks priority, leases, blockers, evidence, and requests for human judgment.
• Agent-friendly Remote Development gives each developer a persistent private workspace where coding agents keep working across devices and disconnections.
• Agent-first Writing Editor turns raw agent output into prose people can absorb without sanding away the author's voice.

Together, these projects are my attempt at semi-autonomous software development: people set direction and own risk; agents keep useful work moving and ask for judgment when it matters.

• Agentic Code Review, a stateful, model-agnostic GitHub App that runs multi-model reviews and learns from accepted and rejected findings.
• Recipe Site, a Cooklang recipe collection with photo and URL import, private recipes, pantry-aware shopping lists, and guided cooking.
• Asset Tracker, a local-first personal finance tool for holdings, allocations, and long-term targets.
• Autonomic Satellite Swarm, a C++ and WebAssembly simulation of self-managing satellite formations.

The products, infrastructure, decision records, and experiments live together in Robbie-Palmer/hq.

• Crossing the Chasm with AI Platform Teams argues that teams cannot wait for the agentic tooling market to settle. The temporary platform work is worth doing now, even when better commodity tools will eventually replace it.