Useful beats impressive
If a project cannot help someone finish a real job, the pitch probably needs less sparkle and more work.
About
Useful things for awkward jobs.
I'm Ruairidh Hastie. Hastie & Co is the studio home for the standalone products, public writing, and carefully shaped experiments I build outside my day job.
The useful middle
Where policy, tooling, and real people meet.
A lot of my work sits in the space between technical systems and the people who have to live with them. Publicly, that shows up in writing about ISO 27001, SOC 2, M365 security, AI tool reviews, shadow AI, and the gap between "managed" and actually known. Hastie & Co keeps that as public thinking and product context, not a packaged consultancy offer.
Working tenets
The values are practical, not decorative.
Hastie & Co works best when the serious bits are precise, the public claims are provable, and the personality is allowed to show up without getting in the way. These are the habits I want the work to keep returning to across the studio and its labels.
Small promises we can prove
Project pages should make clear claims, show the edges, and point to real status, support paths, or verification.
Privacy claims stay specific
Local-first, isolated data sets, and minimised data capture only belong where they are genuinely true for that project and workflow.
AI stays bounded
AI-related writing and experiments should explain the job, the human boundary, the data posture, and the failure mode in plain language, without pretending an early idea is a finished product.
Human behaviour counts
The neatest process in the world fails if it ignores how people actually work under pressure.
Personality without noise
The work can have character and a bit of humour without making the serious bits flimsy.
Clean separation matters
Hastie & Co work stays on personal time, personal kit, public material, and product ideas with enough independence to stand on their own.