I am an actor, writer, film-maker, occasional open source hacker, sometime creator of web curiosities, rarely a photographer, and always a commercial technologist. I used to do a lot of musical things, but time pressures have made that harder as I get older.
I'm passionate about story telling; about physical movement and having fun with what your body is capable of. I strongly believe that being well-connected with your body and your sensuality is essential to living an enjoyable life. I'm also a web standards geek; go figure. If you really want more detail, read on...
I was born in March 1976, and generally try to disclaim blame for the drought that occured in England later that summer. My father, John, was a secondary school teacher and author (super-lucky people around my age from England might have been taught history using some of his books), and my mother, Liz, is a primary school teacher, opera fanatic and Saints supporter. I have one sister, Katharine, who is two years younger than me, and also an opera fanatic and Saints supporter. I am neither an opera fanatic nor a Saints supporter. Just to get things clear.
When I was some indeterminate number of years beyond being able to walk (and even some indeterminate number of days beyond my first date - to a Captain Beaky and His Band concert) we moved from Luton to Salisbury. After primary schools (Bushmead Junior School in Luton, and Alderbury Primary School in ... erm ... Alderbury), I started my expensive education at Chafyn Grove School, in the middle of Salisbury, followed by Dauntsey's School, where I first sailed the world famous pilot cutter Jolie Brise. I wound everything up with a maths degree at Clare College, Cambridge.
On leaving university, I set up a software company with some friends, trying to write what we'd now call a MMORPG. We didn't have any money, so we didn't get very far (although some of the graphical stuff, written by a guy called Sam Hopkins, was awesome), and instead started doing consultancy. Almost the first thing we did was a contract to build a sequencing engine and editor for a multimedia communications company called Insigma Technologies; in October 1997 they asked me to join them full time as Head of Programming.
In 1999, Insigma was renamed to tangozebra, and turned its focus to "rich media" internet advertising, with me as Chief Technical Architect and later Chief Technical Officer, and by 2001 we were recognised as one of the key players in Europe. In November 2001 we were bought by Incepta PLC, in 2003 we started to build our offering outside the rich media space, and in 2007 (having been bounced around a couple of public companies, and established ourselves as a solid advertising technology provider across the digital space, winning Supplier of the Year at the Revolution Awards in March 2007) we were bought by DoubleClick.
In addition to running a team of more than twenty developers and networks/systems engineers, most of my experience at tangozebra was in architecting and building web solutions, including both scalable backend data collection and processing systems, and web applications for managing advertising and marketing activity. As lead technical architect at DoubleClick, as well as transition and integration work, I worked on architecture for frankly enormous scaling issues, and geo-distributed web applications, amongst other things. I left DoubleClick in October 2007; it has since been bought by Google.
My development background goes right back to working in assembler, hacking games in 6502 machine code on the BBC Micro (mostly to put my name indelibly in the high score table), and trying to write far too complex things in BBC BASIC. Since then I've worked in ARM assembler on a text/programmers' editor called Zap, in C++, PHP, Python and others on an information retrieval/search system called Xapian, in C, PHP, Perl, Python, SQL and Java at work, and in HTML+CSS, Javascript, Python and PHP on a Google/BBC weather map mashup, and a flickr-based web flickbook, amongst others. These days I'll knock up new things in PHP, Python or (sometimes) Java.
- Learning over repeating
- Getting things done over planning to perfection
- Paper and whiteboards over computer documentation
- Solutions that match their problems' complexity over simple solutions for everything
- A satisfying solution over one that everyone understands
- A company that stands up for its employees' brilliance
- People who support each other in the difficult times, based on respect grown in the easy times
- An environment that allows projects to start properly, rather than being rushed through
If you want to get in touch with me, you could try emailing me, in which case you might like to read about how I (try) to handle email.