Hello! 👋

I’m Matthew, a 39-year old programmer and business enthusiast who lives in York, UK.

I grew up in Headington, Oxford 🦈, and studied Classics & Computer Science at King’s College in Cambridge 1998-2001.

My work

For 16 years I was Managing Director of Bytemark, the UK’s cloud hosting company - I sold my interest and left at the end of 2018.

Peter and I built the company around engineering ideals - we made our own data centre, software stack and anonymous hiring process. Since 2002 we helped thousands of people put their sites and software into the cloud. Our progressive workplace was a big part of many people’s careers.

Also:

• I’m a director of theatre company One Tenth Human, producing science-inspired arts events.
• I help organise the annual DotYork conference, a day-long conference for curious minds.
• I co-own York Holiday, a new business providing holiday accommodation in York, UK.

Some things I did

• 2018 Sold my company after building it up to 2400 customers & £3.3m revenue
• 2015 Designed version 1 of Bytemark’s anonymous recruitment system
• 2015 Talk: Fair Tax Mark - a perspective from small business at the Fair Tax Mark conference
• 2012 Published first version of flexnbd, the network storage system that powers BigV
• 2011 Designed Bytemark’s BigV hosting platform
• 2004 Talk: Getting the best from your server with User-Mode Linux at UKUUG Winter conference
• 2003 Article: Dropping Windows with WineLib in Dr. Dobb’s Journal
• 2002 Co-founded Bytemark with Peter Taphouse
• 2000 Published riscose, an experimental emulator for Acorn computers
• 1998 Employed at Aleph One Ltd writing features for PCPro 3, the PC emulator for Acorn computers
• 1997 Directed a production of Euripides Medea at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
• 1997 Published Socketeer, an easy internet dialler for Acorn computers
• 1996 Published Swarm, a shameless copy of Crystal Quest, in Acorn User

Photo biography