Hire me
I’m a creative software and network engineer with a deeply collaborative streak. I’ve got experience not just building software, but also a business, teams and tools.
I was the co-founder and Managing Director (CEO) of UK hosting company Bytemark from 2004-2018. I designed and implemented its cloud hosting product (PDF link) and pioneered hiring by anonymous interview, an initiative that elimnated the company’s gender pay gap within 2 years.
I love solving problems with distributed, embedded or high-performance systems. But I’m also hugely motivated by enabling other people with tools and platforms.
As of 2026 I’m particularly interested in video game projects, either as contractor or collaborator.
I work from York, UK and can manage around 30 billable hours a week.
Recent work
- 2026 Overhauled and improving the software for the BDH Active Shifter product, a market-leading sim racing peripheral.
- 2026 No More Robots and Breakpoint Games: Produced the Android and iOS ports of MANIFESTO, a demented “business simulation”.
- 2024-2026 (Undisclosed startup): Designed, purchased and organised the remote installation of a 60PiB storage cluster, starting from an empty data centre suite, based on the MinIO platform.
- 2024-2025 No More Robots and Sharkbomb Studios: Produced the the Android and iOS ports of Nowhere Prophet, a deck-building strategy game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
- 2024 Revolution Games: Produced the Playstation 5 and Xbox ports of Broken Sword - Shadow Of The Templars: Reforged, a brilliant point-and-click adventure originally made in York, UK.
- 2022-2025 Skiller Whale: Wrote a course on the Go programming language, teaching each module many times to groups of learners.
Ancient history
- 2015 Talk: Fair Tax Mark - a perspective from small business at the Fair Tax Mark conference
- 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
- 2002-2018 Co-founded hosting company Bytemark along with Peter Taphouse which we eventually sold for £5m.
- 2000 Programmed riscose, an experimental open-source emulator for Acorn computers
- 1998-2001 Studied Classics (Part I) and Computer Science (Part II) at King’s College, Cambridge
- 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 Programmed Socketeer, an easy internet dialler for Acorn computers
- 1996 Programmed Swarm, a shameless copy of Crystal Quest, in Acorn User
Open source
I wrote the first versions of all of these projects which were key systems at Bytemark:
- flexnbd, the network storage system that powers BigV
- pairvm, a failover hosting system optimised for one client who needed to run their 1970s software with zero down time.
- mauvealert, a universal network and server monitoring system.
- bgpfeeder, a small, programmable implementation of BGP for distributing routes.