Profile

I'm a Software Engineer with an eclectic background. I've worked for the Prison Service (UK), done application and security architecture, security technology research, been trained in moral, political and natural philosophy and even acquired a USPA skydiving license along the way. I've lived on two continents and in four countries. All of this contributes to my unique perspective on software engineering. I have over 20 years' experience in a range of technology roles, and am always keen to work with new tools. I am a programming language nerd as time allows, but I'm also happy in the infrastructure, automating deployments or doing performance analysis. I enjoy working in small tight-knit teams and alone. I favour development projects which use lightweight processes, continuous integration and delivery for fun, profit and risk mitigation.

I am authorized to work in Canada, Germany and the UK. I am not currently authorized to work in the US, but have been in the past. I have been working remotely for over 15 years, as an employee and a freelancer for USian, Canadian and German clients.

As well as being focused on interesting technical work, I am always looking for project based contracts in service of socially and politically agreeable goals, such as putting carbon into the ground or billionnaires on Mars, or any other planet. I'm in the process of planning the incorporation of what will most likely be a co-operative collective consultancy. If that sounds intriguing to you either as a possible client or as a participant, get in touch for more details.

Eventually, once my kids have finished university, I would like to retire into the life of a subsistence hacker, working for physicists, microbiologists and/or climatologists.

Skills & Technologies

I have extensive experience specializing in UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, many Linux distributions including cloud favourites such as Ubuntu, Amazon Linux and CentOS. I currently use Debian Sid as my desktop, though Arch is close to my heart as an old Slackware stan. I also have extensive experience with Solaris unsurprisingly, and am familiar with MacOS and OpenBSD.

I have a lot of DevOps experience, managing production Solaris systems using Puppet, and more recently managing AWS deployments using Terraform and Pulumi. I have worked with Kubernetes and other container solutions, including "plain" Docker using dokku, AWS ECS and other managed solutions.

I am an accomplished programmer, writing code these days primarily in Clojure. I've worked in ClojureScript, Python and Go in recent years. Lately, for non-work projects I've mostly been using Rust and Common Lisp. I have also written code for a living in Java, Ruby, Javascript (mostly Node.js), Perl and a little C. I have no experience with Typescript.

I've designed and built application architectures involving many different kinds of connective tissue, including Kafka, Redis, Amazon Kinesis, and SQS. I've worked with various databases, including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and Cassandra.

I much prefer lightweight development processes, very small teams, and programming practices with short feedback cycles, including REPL based development, continuous testing or test driven design, depending on the language and context. I also prefer continuous integration and delivery. I am not religious about any particular methodology; I have found that different approaches serve different goals, technologies, tools and cultures. Except Emacs, which is the universal invariant.

Finally, my communication skills are decent; I have made numerous presentations as a part of my work, and have presented and facilitated at software conferences (though I have no interest in doing more of this!). In previous roles I have provided ad hoc, formal and informal training to colleagues and customers. I've also trained non-technical end-users, and mentored novice web developers.

Education

Experience