Hi. My name is Bruce Thomas. I'm a senior software engineer based in London, currently focusing on applied AI, automation, and developer experience.
My career didn't start in AI. For over a decade, I worked deep in the front-end ecosystem, eventually specialising in high-traffic AdTech architectures at News Corporation (The Times, TalkSPORT, The Sun). Over time, I found myself increasingly drawn to developer education and advocacy — teaching modern web development practices and helping teams improve their engineering culture.
As the industry evolved, my focus naturally shifted. The most interesting problems were no longer just about rendering pixels efficiently, but about integrating intelligent systems into everyday developer workflows. This led me from traditional front-end engineering and developer advocacy into applied AI — specifically building agent tooling, RAG architectures, n8n orchestration pipelines, and human-in-the-loop automation.
I'm particularly interested in how we can make AI tools practical and reliable rather than just experimental. Recently, I presented on this topic at the News UK All Hands Engineering Meeting, discussing the day-to-day craft of working with LLMs and designing robust agentic harnesses.
lifedrawing.art: A production-risk laboratory
In 2024, I founded lifedrawing.art — a non-profit life drawing community based in Hackney, London. Beyond its real-world purpose, it serves as a live laboratory for my engineering work.
It's the bridge between my front-end background and my current focus on AI-first engineering. Managing a physical event with real attendees, real payments, and real consequences requires reliable systems. I use it to test and deploy emerging technologies before they hit enterprise production. The platform is powered by self-hosted n8n, Gemini AI, Cloudflare Tunnels, Stripe, and Eventbrite APIs — creating a fully automated operational backend that essentially runs the business for me while I'm at my desk job.
social platforms
arbitrary photographs
I love abstract and arbitrary photographs — in contrast to vanity shots. There are so many fascinating things in the world more interesting than a posed smile.
here is one of my own (from unsplash)
creative writing
My lifelong ambition is to write and finish a novel. Over the years I've participated in various writing courses, online competitions and social writing clubs. Some of the stories are published here — the story page is also an experiment in web components.