https://webdex.co.uk/work/Selected engagements, anonymised: safety-critical device-health monitoring for stadium evacuation audio and availability engineering for a public-interest data platform.en-GBMon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://webdex.co.uk/work/stadium-evacuation-audio-monitoring/https://webdex.co.uk/work/stadium-evacuation-audio-monitoring/Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000ArchitectureSystem DesignA silent speaker is the failure that matters Fire alarm, evacuation sequence, and one zone that produces no sound. Nothing in the equipment reports a fault: the amplifiers are healthy, the controller issued the broadcast, the log records that it went out. The speaker that should have carried it had stopped working somewhere between the last manual test and that moment — powered down, stuck after a reboot, or held in a fault state that never cleared. https://webdex.co.uk/work/public-interest-data-platform/https://webdex.co.uk/work/public-interest-data-platform/Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000ArchitectureSystem DesignWho depends on the data The platform publishes data that other organisations make decisions with: government departments, statistical agencies and research groups. They do not work from a local copy, and they cannot wait one out. A dataset that is unavailable is not a degraded experience — it is a figure that cannot be checked, a briefing that cannot be written, a model that cannot be run. That changes the reliability conversation. On a consumer product, availability is a question of how many people notice and how annoyed they are. Here the consumers are organisations with their own deadlines, and an outage propagates: a missed update becomes a delayed publication somewhere else, with somebody else explaining it. The availability target has to be set accordingly, and it has to be something the platform is built against rather than hoped for.