Baker

I used to be a programmer. I was good at it, but I kind of grew to hate it as a means of making a living, so when RSI came calling and made it near-impossible to type for more than about half an hour before I had to take a 45 minute break, I got properly serious about breadmaking. So since Christmas 2017 I’ve been baking sourdough bread for money as The Loafery. It’s not (remotely) as lucrative as programming was, but it’s infinitely more satisfying. And tasty.

Sadly COVID has done for the bakery, so I’m back to baking occasionally at home. My sleep pattern is delighted by this.

Programmer

I was a Perl programmer for well over 10 years, spent a few years as a Ruby programmer before returning to the Perl fold. These days, what little code I write is usually in some sort of Lisp.

Photographer

Discovering that you are good at something is wonderful. I was working in Amsterdam on one of my first programming gigs and commuting back to England most weekends. One day, passing through duty free, I bought myself a cheapish Nikon SLR, loaded it up with black and white film and was almost immediately hooked. Through the simple expedient of burning lots and lots of film and ruthless editing of contact sheets, I got better at it.

Of the images in the portfolio linked to, only one was taken with that first camera; see if you can guess which one it is.

Singer

Singing is comfort food for my soul. Singing is something to be shared. And, because I sing traditional songs, I don’t have to worry about licensing issues if I want to distribute any recordings I make.

Traditional songs — free software for the soul.

Pretentious? Moi?

Cook

Mmm… Chinese food.

All round geek

Look: I have a weblog; I’ve had the same email address since 1996; I’ve never met the majority of my friends in person; I ran my bakery with Emacs; I’d rather spend an evening hacking on the laptop than watching TV. What else could I be?