A Season of Change: Platform Updates and Personal Milestones

Over the last few months, life has shifted in ways that feel both surreal and deeply grounding. It's been one of those rare seasons where everything seems to move at once - career, family, personal milestones, and the long-term direction of my life.

This post covers both what we've shipped on the platform and where I'm at personally - because Bia Electric isn't just software, it's a reflection of everything I'm building.

What We Shipped This Week

Stripe Payments and Credit System

The credit system is now fully live with Stripe integration:

• Credit packages: Starter (25 credits), Professional (60), Business (150), and Enterprise (400)
• Secure checkout via Stripe with automatic credit delivery
• Transaction history with full audit trail
• Welcome bonus of 5 free credits for new users to try the platform

Team Credit Pools

For companies running multiple electricians, we've added organization credit pools:

• Create an organization and invite team members by email
• Admins can purchase credits for the shared pool
• All team members can use credits from the pool
• Role-based access with Admin, QA, and Member roles
• Track who's using credits and for what

Organization Management

Full organization management is now available under Settings:

• Create organizations with company details
• Add team members (they must have a Bia Electric account)
• Assign and change roles
• Remove members when needed
• View organization credit balance

CRM Contacts

The CRM foundation is in place:

• Contact management with full CRUD operations
• Property associations for job tracking
• Ready for expansion with jobs, quotes, and invoicing

A Personal Update

Life right now is full. Wildly full.

I Graduated: Northumbria University, Business and Management (2:1)

This one has been a long time coming.

For me, the goal for years was simply to finish a degree. To cross that line. But somewhere along the way, especially in the final module on Critical Organisational Analysis, my whole perspective cracked open.

As an engineer for most of my career, stepping into the contemporary and postmodern perspective felt like switching operating systems. Suddenly I was thinking about power dynamics, narrative, identity, and organisational meaning in ways I never had before. It was eye-opening, challenging, and exactly the shift I didn't realise I needed.

And yes, it really does feel like a new passport to the world.

Turning 36

Looking back at 26-year-old me, struggling at Bath Uni, heading to South Korea, not even knowing what RS-485 was, it's almost impossible to map a straight line to where I am now.

Over the last decade I've built an electrical career from scratch, gone deep into solar, then deeper into batteries. Now I live and breathe Modbus, VPPs, and energy systems. And suddenly everything I do is entwined with AI.

Life hasn't just changed direction. It's added dimensions.

Becoming a Dad

This wasn't something we were aggressively planning, but emotionally I've been ready for years. Life, career, money - those pieces never quite lined up. I'm not sure they line up now, if I'm honest.

But here's what I've realised: nobody is ever truly ready to be a dad. You just step up, hold on, and give it your absolute best.

And I fully intend to be an excellent dad.

A Full-Circle Moment: Aron Walsh and Cusp.AI

One of the most meaningful influences in my early academic life was Aron Walsh, my tutor at the University of Bath.

We first connected through a few emails about kimchi, unsurprising given his work with Yonsei University. By the end of my first year, I was working on the SMACT project, computationally discovering new perovskites. It opened a world I never knew existed: chemistry by computation, before that concept was cool.

Aron has always been a prodigy, one of the youngest professors at Bath, and now he's stepping into a monumental role as Scientific Director of Cusp.AI, backed by enormous funding and even bigger ambition.

Seeing him combine his decades of computational expertise with modern AI feels like watching a new superpower awaken. I genuinely believe the materials he and his team will create may redefine entire industries.

Bia Electric: The Progress Has Been Insane

The pace of development recently has been unbelievable.

I'm now on the third full iteration of the Bia Electric website, and this time we're doing it properly with a real development workspace through Visual Studio, fully integrated with Claude AI, Git and GitHub, Vercel, AWS EC2, Stripe, and a growing stack of internal tools.

Claude and I have genuinely become a sort of engineering duo. He drafts, I steer. He knots himself occasionally and we untangle it together.

The markdown workflow has been a game-changer. It's like having long-term memory files that persist between conversations, my external ROM, and then Claude picks up with RAM-like fluidity.

Front-end looks sharp. Back-end looks beautiful. And every day feels like a new breakthrough.

What's Next: A Master's Degree in AI Strategy

In January, I'll begin a new chapter at the University of Southampton, studying MA Artificial Intelligence with Digital Transformation.

This degree isn't about me learning to hand-code machine learning algorithms line by line. It's the opposite. It's about the strategic, human, and organisational dimensions of AI.

Not being the guy turning the wheel, but the guy at the helm.

I've already seen firsthand how AI transforms my productivity, my business, and my creativity. Now I want the theoretical depth, the strategy, and the broader understanding to complement the practical speed I already have.

Closing Thoughts

Life right now is full. Wildly full. I'm turning 36, becoming a father, finishing one degree and starting another, and building Bia Electric faster than I ever imagined.

Every few years, my life seems to reshape itself. And this reshaping feels particularly important.

Here's to the next chapter. And everything that comes with it.

Thanks for reading, and for being part of this journey.