Science
I went to Cambridge University for a degree in Natural Sciences, specialising in Physics and taking a 1st.
I submitted my PhD, which I also studied for at Cambridge, in the summer of 2014. The majority of my work revolved around components of the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer, a revolutionary Optical Interferometer to be completed later this decade. This included design and testing of the required components, as well as analytic prediction and simulation of its eventual performance.
Computing
I like tinkering with things a lot - particularly computers. I have worked extensively with Python and PHP, and have a good deal of experience with C++, though still prefer to have the safety net of Google when using it. I get a weird kick out of successfully parallelising simulations or analysis during my PhD.
I decided to leave academia, and am currently working for a startup in London that will hopefully launch its public-facing side in the near future!
I was responsible for the backend of Old Spice Voicemail, which received positive feedback from the advertising company behind the campaign. You can see other things that I have worked on by checking out the projects page, or my github page. Highlights include the first proof of concept execution of a PLEX client for the Raspberry Pi, as well as a monitoring service for Bitcoin miners, which became popular with the mining community.
I am interested in machine learning; I have an account on Kaggle and compete in competitions that interest me in my spare time. This machine learning is something that I keep coming back to, whether it is in the form of a trading algorithm for Bitcoins, or an AI to compete in the Google-sponsored AI Challenge, both of which I have done!
Hardware
As well as the development of software described above, I also hold a love for hardware. This is why I was drawn to an instrumentation Ph.D. This has given me experience interfacing hardware to software, as well as designing experiments to test rigorous requirements of precise optics.
In my free time, I ostensibly have a number of projects on the go -- I own multiple Arduinos and a Raspberry Pi to this end -- but I always find it harder to find enough time for hardware projects, so they too often fall by the wayside when I do desperately want to finish them. An example of a small project I managed to complete is my arcade stick, and an example of one that has been ongoing a (very) long time is the dalek.
About the Site
Built on Pelican, and using a theme based around Bootstrap, this is the latest incarnation of a site that has been with me in various forms for more than ten years now, incredibly. As a result, unfortunately, a lot of my dynamic projects based on PHP and requiring a database backend do not work at this time, but I hope to get them back up in the near future.