I am Richard Boakes; hello.

I was born and raised in Swansea (predominantly in Killay, Dunvant, Langland and Mumbles). At 18 I moved to Plymouth and studied for a BSc (Hons) in Computing & Informatics, graduating in 1995. After several years of commercial employment I returned to academia and undertook a research degree within the Distributed Systems Group (DSG), part of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, graduating with a PhD. I am currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing.

I’ve worked for IBM and Netscape so I’ve been a part of Internet computing since it gained popularity in the mid 1990′s. I’ve frequently worked as a technical lead on projects where the customer is an early adopter of the technology-du-jour; their need to be first to market with fledgling systems has meant balancing contracted and deliverable requirements with the needs of product engineers who are not just building for one customer, but building for many; consequently I understand a little of how the duck looks serene above the water but paddles like the clappers below. I’ve designed, developed, installed, configured, tested, launched and supported systems for many household name companies. During my time with the DSG I was a co-editor of the Grid Computing section of dsonline – an IEEE publication.

I was the first person ever to send email using a phone on the Orange network (because I installed (and helped write) the software) – this may make me the first person in Britain send email from a mobile phone, I have no idea.

I have spent many hours in cooled server rooms.

I’ve run Win32, GNU/Linux, Solaris, OS X, OS/360 and RISC OS machines, and can’t be bothered with holy wars about which system is technically best – they’re all good for different purposes. I believe open source software is a good thing. For a long time I harboured concerns about its economic implications, but those have been largely laid to rest as companies have embraced free software and still paid for computing experts to install, configure, enhance and develop bespoke solutions on top of it, feeding the community with money and invention as it does so.

My main development languages have been (in chronological order): BBC BASIC, 6502 Assembler, AMPLE, ARM2 Assembler, Pascal, CoBOL, Modula-2, C, C++, Lisp, Strand, Smalltalk, Java, Python, JavaScript (again) and PHP. There are lots of other languages in there too, but these are the main ones.

In stark contrast to the geek/engineer stereotype I do not drink coffee, but I have been known to enjoy a pot of tea. I like an occasional beer, a golden Real Ale is preferable, something with a little bite; and not too warm.

Movies I’ve enjoyed include, The Life of Brian, The Shawshank Redemption, The Usual Suspects, Dogma, and Ferris Buellers Day off. A protagonist fighting against authoritarian silliness obviously works well for me. Several years ago I found myself in Chicago with a day to kill and tried to fit in as much of Ferris’s day as possible.

It was common practice in the 70s and early 80s for kids to be invited up to see the flight deck when aboard commercial airliners. So aged 8, aboard a Boeing 737 with a full compliment of passengers, I got to steer. Not something that happens any more.

Everyone should have an ambition that is almost impossible to fulfill, so mine is to fly in an Avro Lancaster and maybe to walk to the Geographic North Pole.

I can ski, but prefer to snowboard off the piste and in the trees, and I’ve got out of the top of a full size half-pipe; they are surprisingly high and steep. I still own a surfboard, but don’t get the chance to use it. If any university by the sea with a regular left-hand break and light offshore winds is looking for a guest lecturer, please drop me a line.

I support Amnesty International because democracy and equal human rights are not yet enjoyed every human on the planet, and Greenpeace because those rights aren’t going to be worth much if we don’t have a planet to live on.

I hope that humans can escape the planet before the heat death of the sun.

I have crowd surfed at Glastonbury, ran the London Marathon, slept without a tent in the middle of the Australian desert, dived on the Great Barrier Reef, watched sunrise from the bottom of Death Valley, frightened an octopus in the Caribbean; accidentally got very close to a wild brown bear while walking through the national park in Sequoia, California; and (carefully and respectfully) clambered over and around many ruined temples in Cambodia; been caught in a bushfire (and helped the local farmer get help saving his crop); held a piece of the moon (and met one of the twelve who’ve walked on it), been inside Oskar Schinder’s factory, and visited Auschwitz.

What next? Suggestions welcome.