Hello! 👋
I’m a 42-year old programmer who co-founded, built and sold a hosting company with its own data centre.
I write and edit programming language curriculums for Skiller Whale 🐳, a startup providing hands-on coaching to small groups of programmers.
If you have internet infrastructure or horrible programming problems, I love troubleshooting 🎯 and you can hire me to help!
Here are some online tools I’ve written:
- GuestRevenue, an accounts tool for owners of holiday lets and vacation rentals.
- clock.fit, a polished fitness and gym timer.
- Undojo, a tool for parents which copies updates from the ubiquitous Classdojo system to your email.
I’m a trustee of One Tenth Human, an award-winning theatre company, creating brain-stretching adventures with extraordinary artists, kids and scientists.
And I co-own York Holiday with my wife - we run 3 comfortable holiday homes in our home city of York.
In the past
From 2002-2018 I co-founded (along with Peter Taphouse) and was Managing Director of Bytemark a friendly UK hosting company which was well-known in the world of open source & free software.
I grew up in Headington, Oxford 🦈, and studied Classics & Computer Science at King’s College in Cambridge 1998-2001.
Professional hilights
- 2022 Joined Skiller Whale
- 2020 Started Black And White Software to build software again.
- 2018 Sold my company after building it up to 2400 customers & £3.3m revenue
- 2015 Designed and programmed v1 of Bytemark’s anonymous recruitment system
- 2015 Talk: Fair Tax Mark - a perspective from small business at the Fair Tax Mark conference
- 2012 Designed and programmed v1 of flexnbd, the network storage system that powers BigV
- 2011 Designed and programmed Bytemark’s BigV hosting platform with Nick Thomas and Alex Young
- 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, an engineering-centred hosting company, with Peter Taphouse
- 2000 Programmed riscose, an experimental open-source emulator for Acorn computers
- 1998 Employed at Aleph One Ltd writing BIOS code, a complete UI rewrite & manuals for the last major release of PCPro 3, the PC emulator for Acorn computers
- 1997 Directed a production of Euripides' Medea at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
- 1997 Programmed Socketeer, an easy internet dialler for Acorn computers
- 1996 Programmed Swarm, a shameless copy of Crystal Quest, in Acorn User
Photo biography
