For nearly a decade, a good friend and I have been signing off messages with #NoBarriers. It started as a joke at the expense of a CA Technologies sales campaign, some year’s battle cry for the sales droids to dig deep and smash their numbers. Corny, clichéd, and irresistible to two people who took the mickey out of everything. The joke was sealed on a flight home from Las Vegas in November 2017. I had been booked into premium economy on account of a back injury, and at the gate I was bumped up to business. He messaged me: “Great news, I’m with you in premium economy.” I replied from what was very obviously business class: “No barriers.” He had, naturally, been given my old seat.

It has been our sign-off ever since. But to explain why that week in Las Vegas stuck with me, I need to tell you about CA World.

Six weeks after

CA World 2017 was held at the Mandalay Bay in mid-November. Six weeks earlier, on the 1st of October, a man had opened fire from a suite on the 32nd floor of that same hotel into the crowd at a music festival below, shooting dead fifty-eight people. The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, and the conference went ahead anyway, in that building, six weeks later.

My room was on the 30th floor, two below his and vertically in line. The view from my window was, near enough, the view he had. I stood there more than once trying to make that thought fit somewhere, and it wouldn’t. Las Vegas is kitsch and garish at the best of times, but an enterprise software sales event in that hotel, at that moment, felt grotesque. Nobody seemed to notice.

The grand opening set the tone. Monday morning, thousands of besuited, pumped-up sales guys schlepping into the main hall with their donuts and coffees. CA was in its death throes by then (Broadcom bought the company the following year), and Mike Gregoire, the CEO, chose to walk on stage to Break On Through by The Doors. A middle-aged software executive strolling out to Jim Morrison, attempting to reanimate the corpse of CA Technologies through the power of a walk-on track. What would Jim do? Then came the motivational speaker, a mountaineer, all energy and seizing the moment and being your best self, and the hall whooped and hollered on cue. I sat watching it and thought: none of this connects to anything. A pep rally in a building where fifty-eight people had just been murdered, soundtracked by a dead rock star, thrown by a dying company. Every part of it was walled off from every other part, and from reality.

One morning my friend and I ran up the Strip to the famous sign and watched the sun rise over Las Vegas. On the walk back he said, “You know this isn’t working for you.” I didn’t say much, but I knew he was right. Later that morning I went down to the auditorium, took one look around, and walked out. The spa downstairs sold me a week’s pass for $150, and I spent the remainder of CA World in the jacuzzi.

Which brings us back to the flight home. Freshly upgraded to business class, my first act was to pass out drunk, wake three hours later somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, and noisily demand dinner and red wine. It’s what Jim would have wanted.

I wasn’t even in sales. I was a solution architect, the token techie wheeled in to make the pitch credible. But that week crystallised something I had known for a while: I was living in a world, and doing a job, that I could not connect with and that meant nothing to me.

Out the other side

CA imploded on schedule, and eventually I stepped out of corporate life altogether and set up my own consultancy. Independence, my own boss, no more sales kick-offs. That fixed the job. It didn’t, on its own, fix the disconnection.

Then came October 7th. The massacre in Israel, and the horror that unfolded in Gaza in the months that followed. I watched it the way most people did, appalled and doing nothing, until I read I can’t sleep by Paul Biggar, the founder of CircleCI. He wrote about the injustice of what was happening, and pointedly about the silence of his own investors and fellow founders. Within days he had been removed from the board of the company he built. He went off and founded Tech for Palestine.

That post moved me from watching to doing. Since February 2025 I have been working with Gaza Sky Geeks, mentoring people who were handed the most awful lot imaginable through no fault of their own. In that time we have mentored five of their candidates. I now mentor another Palestinian engineer in Dublin, and one former intern works for me permanently as my staff member in Palestine. I have spoken at their events, advocated for them relentlessly, and recently came off the back of a three-part webinar series for their technical community: the better part of nine hours presenting and talking about AI enablement.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I noticed the disconnection had gone. If I had to name what replaced it, it comes down to three things. I am aware that a man who just spent five hundred words mocking a motivational speaker is about to give you a list. The difference is that nobody is paying me, and there is no light show.

Passion

The last two and a half years I have immersed myself completely in AI. I was an early adopter, back when it meant getting help writing and debugging Python against the APIs I was working on, and it has since worked its way into every part of my life: the business, the technology, my research, my own skills. It has been a force multiplier unlike anything I have seen in thirty years of technical work, and I have watched it do the same for others. The webinar series I ran for the Palestinian technical community was AI work enablement, start to finish, because I believe it is the single biggest lever available to people trying to rebuild a working life from inside a catastrophe.

A customer’s CISO said to me recently, “You bring an incredible passion and level of expertise in all things AI.” I would never have described myself that way, and hearing it from someone else was quietly profound. I have enjoyed most of the work I have done over three decades. Nothing has ever felt like this.

Purpose

I am South African. I spent my early career building HSMs and crypto modules for the military in the apartheid years. The wrong side of history, and I knew it even then. Later I spent five years at Deutsche Bank, building technology for the same investment banking machine that had crashed the economy in 2008. Not much to be proud of on either count.

What I do now has a point. I help companies adopt AI safely and securely. And at a small startup doing work I believe in, we are building privacy and protection technology: tools for people operating and reporting in conflict zones, for press freedom and data sovereignty, and for victims of domestic abuse to keep their most private thoughts secure and to preserve evidence from their phones. Every line of it is aimed at people less fortunate than ourselves.

AI is what makes my part of that possible. I was a journeyman software writer at best, and I knew it. People have occasionally accused me of moments of genius in solving problems; the code was always the bottleneck between the idea and the thing. AI levels that field completely. The ideas finally get to run at full speed, and for once they are running toward something worthwhile.

People

First, the Palestinians themselves. These are people going through suffering most of us cannot imagine, and I have seen almost no self-pity, no victim mentality, and surprisingly little anger. What I have seen is relentless focus: on university places, on finding ways to earn, on getting out, on getting married and wanting children, on getting on with life.

Then there is everyone I have met along the way. Biggar, who walked away from his own creation. People like Tom Hall at Tech for Palestine, who gave up corporate careers for something that matters. Founders here in the UK who told me the same story: they were nervous about speaking out, they had no idea what it would cost them, and what they found instead was their tribe. I now lead a Tech for Palestine project team working on AI bias, surrounded by exactly these people.

What this community does, beyond any individual project, is show the people of Palestine that they are not alone, not isolated, and not forgotten. Of the three things in this list, that is the one that matters most.

What it’s actually about

When I started this work I harboured the usual fantasy: I was going to ride in on a white horse and change their lives. Somewhat ironically, and entirely in keeping with the incongruity that runs through this post, what actually happened did so largely unknown to me. Quietly, and to my complete surprise, I changed my own life. Through this work I have found a focus and a drive in what I do every day that I never once felt in a conference hall, and I will not be going back. My only real regret is how long I sat in those keynotes, whooping crowds on one side, a jacuzzi on the other, wondering why nothing connected.

In 2017, No Barriers was a hollow slogan and a private joke about a stolen seat. It took me the better part of a decade to earn the hashtag: no barrier now between what I am good at, what I care about, and who I do it with.

Wake up, people, it’s later than you think.