About

I’m a computer programmer. Employers have variously called me different flavours of engineer, developer and manager. But in my head, I’ll always be a computer programmer, ever since I was the kid asking permission to sit indoors with the classroom BBC Model B instead of going outside at break.

I’ve written programs in more languages than I can remember, starting with Oric Atmos Basic, through C and 68k assembly on the Amiga, a lot of Perl I’ve forgotten how to read, JavaScript before there were any “Good Parts”, enterprise Java and C#, Objective-C, and lately a bit of Rust and a lot of TypeScript.

But hardly any Ruby. If you’re looking for the Ruby guy, that’s a different Tom Waddington.

Professionally, most of that programming has been in service of some web site/app or other, as part of technical teams rarely more than a dozen people strong. Collectively, that work has generated hundreds of millions of pounds of revenue.

My favourite kind of programming is functional, REPL-driven, and in Clojure. I also like PostgreSQL, Jujutsu, and the Helix editor. I wrote an nREPL plugin for Helix in Scheme and Rust and contributed the Clojure textobjects.scm tree-sitter queries to Helix, so I could write my favourite programming language in my favourite editor.

When I’m not programming computers, I like painting toy soldiers, playing board games, and walking up hills, walking back down hills, and, if can possibly be arranged, walking directly into a nice bit of the Mediterranean at the end.

Whatever I’m doing, there’s music playing.