Twenty-Five Years.
Four Versions.
One Obsession.

My journey into warehouse management started at Wydata Technologies, where I project-managed systems that helped businesses weigh, label and track goods through their operations. I was involved in some of the earliest 2D barcode implementations in the industry — PDF417 systems that, at the time, felt genuinely pioneering.

Two and a half decades of watching goods flow in and out of warehouses gave me something no amount of software training can buy: a clear picture of exactly where the problems were. Paper manifests. Verbal updates. Spreadsheets that were out of date before they were printed. I knew what the system should look like. I just had to build it.

I had a basic grasp of Visual Basic 6 and a copy of Microsoft Access. That was enough to start. I built the first version of ContainerMaster myself — a system for tracking goods movements with as little manual intervention as possible. It ran on one PC, then I connected it across a local network so the whole team could use it simultaneously.

The name came naturally. We were in the business of RH&D — Receive, Handle & Deliver — so "Container" was obvious. "Master" came from somewhere more personal: a word from one of my favourite films, The Last Dragon, that had always stuck in my mind. ContainerMaster it was.

The business grew — and ContainerMaster had to grow with it. CM2 was a substantial rebuild: a proper database backend, separate front ends for different staff roles, more reports, more automation. One customer in particular, Talasey (then trading as Natural Paving), was expanding rapidly, and the software was expanding alongside them.

If you look at the CM2 switchboard, you can see the story written right there — dedicated sections for Natural Paving, Vision Natural Stone, container operations, invoicing. It was still a local system, but it was doing serious work for a serious business.

Cloud services had arrived and it was clear CM2 had reached its limits. I partnered with Kristy Siu — a developer introduced through a mutual friend — who took my requirements and made them real. CM3 launched as a proper web application, accessible from anywhere, with a clean interface built for a modern operation.

CM3 has been running since 2017. Nearly a decade on, it's still managing our warehouse workflow day in and day out. That kind of longevity doesn't happen by accident — it happens when the software is designed by someone who genuinely understands the process it's built for.

When Kristy moved on to other projects, I turned to AI to fill the gaps in my programming knowledge. The result is CM4 — entirely my own work, and the most complete version yet. Deployed in 2026, it runs our warehouse in real time. Updates and improvements go live immediately, shaped by feedback from every level of the operation.

What I'm most proud of isn't any single feature. It's that this system was built by someone who has genuinely been there — who knows what a driver's manifest needs to say, what a warehouse manager needs to see at six in the morning, and what goes wrong when software is designed by people who've never set foot on the floor.