Introducing F
I spend a lot of my energy supporting and advocating for people like and unlike me
Hello, I’m F.
Before joining dxw as a developer, I made games and websites for love and profit. I’ve been employed by and done work for a number of startups, but most recently, I was Lead Developer at Sensible Object, making physical-digital games augmented by Amazon Alexa. The switch to public sector work was motivated by a combination of startup burnout and a desire to “use my powers for good” (along with a healthy amount of anti-capitalism).
I’m a self-taught programmer, trained as a mathematical physicist. During my studies, I learned to code building a music playlist shuffler because I didn’t want to have to choose what music to listen to, but also had preferences for what was played (before all music was streamed – Google chooses for me now). The skills I learned led to me moving to Canada to attempt a PhD involving simulating large scale phenomena from different structures of spacetime. I lasted 6 months. Once I (finally) realized that academia was a Bad Idea, I moved back to the UK and got a job making mobile games.
My daily driver OS of choice is Arch Linux, which probably speaks volumes about me. I’ve done frontend work, backend work, tool development, and some devops. I started out writing a lot of Python, then a lot of C#, then a lot of JavaScript and some more Python (and CSS / Sass etc.), then some more C#, then a lot of TypeScript and some Terraform. In amongst all of that, I also picked up some Go, Clojure, C, and a smattering of other things. I’m new to Ruby, but I’m looking forward to making friends with it.
When I’m not writing code, thinking about writing code, or talking about writing code, I spend my time watching entire TV series in single nights, building imaginary video game farms, getting art indelibly marked on my body, and talking to people about queer and trans issues. I’m agender (they / them, please) and queer, and I spend a lot of my energy supporting and advocating for people like and unlike me. I also plan (read: hope (read: dream)) to move onto a narrowboat this year. This is the second year I’ve been saying this.