About

This site is a log of various ideas and projects I am working on. Posts are divided into two types, blog and code. The code section is a library of scripts and snippets partly for my own use which I hope will useful to some DBAs and developers. The posts in the blog section are more detailed posts on topics which I am currently thinking about.

Despite playing around with ‘Basic’ programming for a while when I was child I only got seriously interested in programming whilst I was studying philosophy. This was partly because it dawned on me that no one was going to pay me to philosophise and computers seemed like the most interesting paid alternative, but also because programming languages and developments in artificial intelligence seemed to shed light on the philosophical problems I was interested in. Fundamental issues like the relationship between mind and brain for example became more approachable when considered analogous to the software/hardware distinction.

For the last 9 years I have been working as a Developer, DBA, technical team lead and scrum master for a wide range of companies including web startups, investment banks, charities and the UK government. I work mainly with Microsoft tech, c# and SQL Server in particular, for reasons I will blog about at some point, although I have also worked extensively with open source tech including mysql, postgres, python and java. I am currently CEO (database engineer, scrum master, tea maker) at friendfund.com which was founded by myself and Martin Peschke to enable friends to pay for things together.

Besides the actual coding I am very interested the structure and dynamics of teams and projects. Having worked in a large number of organisations I have seen it done very well and terribly badly and each experience has taught me something about how to motivate and guide teams of developers through complex projects. In general I think this is still poorly understood by many companies and as a result their projects are often late, over budget, poor quality or fail altogether.