About

I still remember the first program I ever got working. It was a plain black screen with a few lines of text on it — nothing anyone would have paid for — but I had told a machine what to do and it had listened, and that was enough to change what I wanted to do with my life. I spent the months after that working out how information should move through a system: where it gets kept, who is allowed to touch it, and what ought to happen when something goes wrong. That turned into my final school project, a small tool that reads the links in your email and warns you when one of them looks like a trap.

My first real job was on the visible side, building the screens and dashboards people click through every day. I learned it quickly, mostly because I had no choice — it was a live product with real users on it, and there is no gentler way to learn than that. A few months in I asked to move to the team working behind the scenes, and they let me. That meant learning a coding language I had never written a single line of; I was building real features with it inside a month, and stayed eight months at that company across the two teams.

Since then I have drifted further behind the scenes, which is where I am most useful. I have looked after the machines and accounts that keep things online, built a shop checkout system from nothing just to see whether I could carry the whole thing myself, and these days I build the invisible half of a mobile app — everything that happens in the gap between someone tapping a button and the right answer coming back. I set up the servers it lives on as well, so keeping the thing standing is part of my job rather than somebody else's.

When I'm not doing any of that, I'm taking photographs, editing them, or making short films. It sounds like a separate life, but it isn't. Framing a photograph and designing a screen turn out to be the same problem wearing different clothes — both are mostly about deciding what to leave out.