About
I’m a Scottish sixty-year-old guy. I live in Hackney in London, UK, with my partner. Our two grown-up youngsters visit infrequently.
I’m a writer and a software developer. (Somewhere along the line I switched to saying that, rather than “programmer”, but it’s the same thing.)
For what I’m doing at the moment, see my /now page. Or just read the blog.
Writing
The novel I started as part of my masters is finished except I need to rewrite the start. I’m working on another one. I completed a couple of novels before that, though both of them could use some serious rewriting, especially the later one. And I’ve nothing published, except one poem in a long-defunct magazine.
In the academic year 2020-21 I did something I should probably have done twenty, thirty, or more years ago: I took a masters in creative writing.
Software Development
A long time ago I discovered that people would pay me for something I loved doing. It wasn’t music, or writing, but at least it was an indoor job with no heavy lifting, as an old friend used to say.
Mainly Java, some Python, JavaScript. Recently I’ve been professionally dealing with infrastructure as code (IaC), and learning Terraform.
Linking that to writing, I have done a fair amount of technical writing. For example this exciting piece from a recent job.
Music
Not quite such a long time ago I used sing and play guitar in Burn, a cowpunk band. We kind of wound up a decade or so back. Though never formally. We “broke up through musical indifference”, as our drummer Tony puts it.
These days I haven’t picked up my guitar in years. Still love music though, and write about it fairly often here.