I write about diverse topics that interest me, I hope you will find something that helps, motivates or interests you.
Some history
Growing up on a remote Scottish hill farm probably isn’t the typical route into technology but the long evenings and lack of mobile signal for a child of the 90’s drives them straight to MSN Messenger. Dial-up, floppy disks, download managers, WinAmp, Limewire, Uplink and chat rooms pulled me into a fascinating online world. With a wealth of knowledge at my fingerprints it was a geeky teenager’s paradise and by the time I left school I turned my back on the ideas of Law or Civil Engineering and started Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at Edinburgh University.
Truth be told I was a little disappointed. Two years of maths proofs and theory, basic functional (Haskell) and object orientated (Java) programming with limited practical work left me demotivated and with low (sometimes failing) grades. Instead I made my own education by using my limited knowledge to win working contracts as cheap student labour, taking on web development and maintenance tasks, spending my spare time solving problems and filling my knowledge gaps.
Software development is fortunately a rare discipline where bedroom hackers can rival even the best students for a lot of jobs and armed with a portfolio of demonstratable experience a tech startup in Edinburgh hired me before I finished my degree.
Since then I have joined smaller-and-smaller startups, looking for diverse teams; scaling challenges and chances to learn new skills. Each employer has left a permanent mark on me and I am forever grateful to the opportunities presented. With their help and my own drive I have grown from a Python developer to front and backend web development - Wordpress to Django to APIs + mobile apps - to DevOps, architecting and implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipelines across multiple cloud platforms.
Present day
October 2018 I left my old employer after twenty-one months and ended up living in Tokyo, exploring Japan and hacking on my own projects for some months. As project ideas came and went, iterated and evolved I was encouraged to hear an old colleague of mine share a similar idea. Today we are building an IT marketplace that allows software companies to sell their products in the cloud helping their customers find and use new software and APIs easier than ever before.
With technology present throughout our lives and such a vast, varied landscape I have continued to be drawn in different directions, sparking fresh ideas and meeting some wonderful people along the way. This blog serves to help me document some of these experiences and catalog my thoughts.
About
- Age 30
- Heritage British
- Interests Sports, Photography, Travel, Software Engineering, Startups
- Employer Arbalo AG
- Fun Fact Named a mountain in Kyrgyzstan
My Gear
- Laptop Macbook Pro 13"
- Workstation Coming Soon
- Mobile Huawei P20 Pro
- Headphones Sony WH-1000XM3
- Camera Fuji X-T20
- Lenses Fuji XF 35mm f/2.0, Samyang 12mm f/2.0
Software
- Primary Editor VS Code
- Browser Firefox
- Music Spotify
- Photo Editing Affinity Photo
- VPN Private Internet Access
This Site
- Created 2019
- Tech Stack Hugo, Bulma, Firebase
- Theme Inspired by Paul Stamatiou
Get in Touch
- DM me on Twitter
The fine print
Thoughts and opinions on this site are solely my own unless explicitly stated otherwise. Throughout the website there are affiliate links to selected partners. These provide a small kickback to help support this website at no cost to you, the user. Unless explicitly stated I am not being paid or sponsored to endorse specific products.