Colin Taylor

I’m Colin Taylor. After more than 25 years in software development and technology leadership, I run Colt Consulting as a fractional CTO and developer. Our products are operated under Futureproof.dev, including Click Dog, which I created and maintain. About Futureproof explains how the two fit together.

I began my career in 1999, building e-commerce and financial applications in New Zealand and London. During the dot-com era, I gained extensive startup experience as a lead engineer before becoming the technical lead for IBM’s UK National Lottery online subscriptions launch.

Returning to NZ, I co-founded Right Context, where we built an e-commerce SaaS platform powering millions in sales, including the NZ Herald’s Newspix and Presspix services. After Right Context was acquired by SMX in 2009, I became VP of Development and later CTO, leading the architecture and operations of a global SaaS email security platform serving government and enterprise clients.

Spark NZ, the country’s biggest telco, outsourced its business and Xtramail consumer platforms to SMX. To quote the marketing campaign, we “brought NZ’ers email home” after years of Yahoo Mail outages and security breaches. I designed the architecture for a new Service Provider platform, which was the first to successfully migrate off of Yahoo, and later adopted by several telcos in the US and Asia-Pacific region. The platform featured advanced threat detection systems, integrating AI classifiers to improve phishing detection and reduce false positives.

SMX’s success in government IT security (we protected the Ministry of Defence and Inland Revenue amongst many others) led to my involvement in cybercrime initiatives with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I was responsible for reporting on the state of New Zealand’s email security, analyzing billions of threat detections for trends and insights.

In 2021, I founded Colt Consulting (hire me as a Fractional CTO), working with teams across Australia, New Zealand, the US, and Southeast Asia, specializing in network security, media, advertising, data analytics, and financial services. As AI technologies advanced, I helped numerous clients implement AI-augmented workflows, integrate LLMs into existing products, and develop AI governance frameworks to ensure safe and responsible deployment.

Click-Dog came out of that work: operating ClickHouse in production and wanting query observability in the telemetry stack teams already ran, without making the database harder to run. It is open source under Apache 2.0, and I maintain it.

“A clever, critical thinker using Stoic wisdom before producing the first line of pure, functional code. He made me approach problems more efficiently from a different perspective.”

— Michael H

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