Trying to be less insecure is really a snapshot of my professional life.
I built my first computer from a kit (a Microtan 65) when I was 12 years old. Since I couldn’t afford the BASIC ROMs at the time, I learned to program in 6502 machine code – I couldn’t afford an assembler ROM or an ASCII keyboard either 🙁
I work for Qualcomm Inc in the UK, as you can read on my LinkedIn profile. The technical side of my professional life looks at device security and how to make it better at reasonable cost. Some of this is proprietary, so don’t bother to ask me about it, but much of what is feasible is not used as extensively as it could be in the market, and I would like to help developers to gain an understanding of what is possible. Despite being a manager, I still consider myself (just about!) to be a software engineer – most of that experience has been in C and C++ on embedded systems (or at least fairly low-level programming).
I am a member of the Board of Directors, and chair of the Trusted Platform Services committee at GlobalPlatform – an open standards body dedicated to making it easier to secure platforms and then manage those secured platforms. I believe passionately in the potential of open and interoperable standards in security as one of the best ways to help us to make our increasingly digital lives better by making some of the doomsday scenarios around loss of privacy and lack of IoT security much less likely.
Since my day job is about as stateful and imperative as things can possibly be, I have been dabbling in Haskell for quite a few years now as it is just about the most different environment imaginable, and it has led me to believe that sophisticated type systems have the potential to make much of our software better. I try to answer the occasional Haskell or C related question on Stack Overflow as well – you may find useful stuff which never made it to this blog. You will also find answers to random questions, some of them technical or career-related, on Quora.
I have led and recruited teams for many years now, and I hope there’s something useful to pass on to both other managers and people looking to move to the next phase in their careers. Perhaps it will even help some to understand why their own managers behave as they do. I’d like to show people who are perhaps new, reluctant or lacking confidence in managing technical teams just how rewarding it can be.
My ambition is to write my very own monad.