I've been working as a programmer for twenty years, and coding as an amateur for ten years before that. In professional employment I've worked for several mental health and social justice nonprofits, and I was on the prerelease team which built the Nokia N900. As a volunteer I've written the "Gnusto" engine (compiling Z-machine bytecode to JavaScript), and the social network tracker "Joule" (now defunct), and I was the primary maintainer for Gnome's window manager for several years. And as a teenager I co-wrote two graphical adventure games, "Denarius Avaricius Sextus" and "Lord Avalot d'Argent".

I'm fascinated by alphabets, and by the idea of representation. I have a first-class BSc in computer science from the University of Hertfordshire. I ran the campaign to get Alan Turing on the ten pound note. And I write poetry, and fairly often it gets published.