About

I’m a technologist. For the first ~5 years of my career I worked at a then-startup called SwiftKey. I joined very early on and worked on…a ton of things, from low-level C++ optimization all the way up to building initial cloud services for bulk language processing, and everything in between.

I then moved to a quantitative hedge fund called GSA Capital and stayed for another five years. Such companies contain a huge amount of software and it’s not always easy to explain to outsiders what it all does, but it’s probably accurate to call my slice a combination of middle-office data management and multi-asset-class trade executions. It’s much more interesting than it sounds, I promise.

On the technology side I consider myself a back-end generalist. But in the last few years I’ve spent quite a while making the JVM do what I want - whether that’s functional programming with Scala, optimizing latency with Java, or just…having fun with Clojure.

Right now I have some free time, so I’m learning Haskell.

The blog

This blog is spilling out of my fingers partly because I find writing enjoyable, partly out of vanity and the vague hope I can contribute something of value, and partly because if my thoughts are wrong then I’d rather find out sooner than later. And you can’t be Wrong On The Internet for long before someone tells you about it.

The blog will likely be very low volume. I’ll try stick to programming and technology but I might venture off if I find myself with coherent thoughts on other topics.

Feel free to shout at me on Twitter.