I’m an independent software developer. I’ve been coding away, doing this for a couple of decades, but it started for me when my dad bought a ZX Spectrum in the early 1980s and I typed in the programs from the manual.

My school had a room of Acorn Electrons and BBC Micros which I used a lot, especially for BASIC… and games. Later they had Acorn Archimedes which were mind-blowing at the time. I upgraded to an Amiga 500, another great machine. Looking back, it was a transformative moment in history to live through, especially as a kid.

These days I’m interested in functional programming from the strict to the pragmatic, like Haskell, Elm, Rust, and up-and-comers like Roc. I know MySQL and SQLite pretty well but I usually reach for PostgreSQL when I need a database. I think GraphQL is useful, but also complex.

I did a few years as a “serverless” developer, coding in TypeScript. That’s a cool language even if it’s not my favourite. JavaScript is its raison d’être, but it’s also compromised by that JavaScript legacy.

Python was my first proper love, but years of building large applications showed me its limitations, and we grew apart. I had been lured away by type systems and functional programming, Elm especially.

I’ve worked with Ruby, Elixir, Perl, and others. I have written way too much shell script, especially Bash. Golang is a thing that I can do, but it’s not my favourite.

I live in Luxembourg with my two teenage children. I speak English natively, basic French, a touch of Luxembourgish – and I’ve reached 100 day Duolingo streaks for German and Turkish 🏆

Cycling is awesome; we should do more of that.