I have made my living as a software developer for the best part of 30 years.
I've worked for a national newspaper, an independent music distributor, a couple of different ISPs, a data marketplace startup, several research-funded survey organisations and a research datacentre.
On this journey I've picked up a full stack of skills, can turn my hand to pretty much anything technological.
As an RSE at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology I've worked on a really mixed bag of projects - extracting vegetation data from drone imagery, setting up Raspberry PI field instruments, open source interface libraries for proprietary dataloggers, cloud-based IoT configuration, syndicating bat acoustic metadata.
I've done a lot of data work in the past. I was one of the original group of contributors to OpenStreetmap. I sat on the first boards of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, and contributed to the GeoJSON and OpenSearch standards. I co-wrote an O'Reilly book, "Mapping Hacks", published 2005.
I'm a 2025 Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute. You can watch me on a panel at the Open Source Hardware Association in 2025, speaking about my Fellowship theme of applying research software principles to hardware - a version of a talk given most recently at the HPC-AI Advisory Council Annual Conference. This has been a free time activity, rather than a use of working hours, I've been able to use some of the attached fund to support other people to run workshops, engaging hackers, ecologists and local communities with their prototype ideas.
I do some code artwork and at one life stage advertised myself as a "software artist".
I'm thinking about the future now.