About

it me

Programming

I’ve been programming every day since I was very young, and thoroughly enjoy it. Before I left highschool I’d spoken at my first technical conference, uploaded my first open-source contributions, and got my first paid technical-writing commissions. I started work straight out of high-school, although I went back to study in my late 20s.

My last purely programming role was as Software Architect for the Test Automation team at Apprentice, and my last purely management role was as CTO leading a 40-person team at Broadbean. Notable other projects include making robots whizz around a warehouse for Net-A-Porter and being part of the iPlayer team at the BBC. I am currently Director of AI at ddx, which involves a mixture of product, programming, and solution architecture.

Ventures

  • I spent most of 2024 building a B2C venture for complaining to your loved ones about the TV shows you were watching, with what I thought was a very fancy algorithm to provide recommendations. Sadly our reach never extended beyond family and friends.

  • I ran — part-time — the premier recruitment agency for Perl programmers for about ten years. At one point we had four full-time staff, but the market for Perl programmers was already moribund when I started it (2014), and had completely disappeared by the time we called it quits at the end of 2023.

  • I was CTO and part-owner of a media-monitoring company in my mid-20s. While we had a client-list to die for (Tesco, Samsung, Siemens, Kraft), sadly our revenue never got to an exciting stage.

Education

I didn’t start an undergraduate degree, but they were kind enough to admit me to study for an Masters in Software Engineering at the University of Oxford in my late 20s, where I was awarded the CAR Hoare prize for finishing first in examinations. I wrote my thesis on the design of my most substantial open-source contribution, a featureful and robust implementation of Cucumber in Perl.

The devil makes work for idle hands, and I found myself enrolled in a Masters in Entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge towards the end of Covid, and wrote my thesis on using ChatGPT to analyse investment pitches.

The best learning material I’ve ever come across is Andrej Karpathy’s Neural Networks: Zero to Hero, and slogging through it was highly worth the investment in time.

Other Writing

There’s assorted career advice for developers at Code for More.

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You can email me at: [email protected]

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