About

Hi there. I'm Adam James. I'm a software developer and graduate of Hull University working for Oracle Corporation in the UK. You can find the mess I've made in various places around the web by visiting adamjames.me.

If I could pick anything at all to work on, it'd be something related to building real-time scalable systems - along the lines of working with streaming media and public-facing web services, handling large data sets (and the analytics that goes with them) to gain exposure to lots of new technology and ways of working. I'm primarily concerned with ensuring my knowledge and experience remains useful whilst broadening my technological and professional horizons as much as possible. I'm doing what I can to learn new things in my spare time, but the best way to learn new tech is to work with it!

I first started programming in Visual Basic, learning from a book I got in my early teen years. I dabbled a bit, then went on to learn C# at university. The product I work on primarily uses VB.NET, but I still use C# regularly to keep it fresh in my mind. Recently, I have been learning about and applying the provisioning tool Vagrant to my personal workflow; reintroducing myself to modern MS-based MVC outside of work (because the project I work on doesn't use it) and refreshing my knowledge of the source control tools Git and Mercurial, because they're great. I've also been following the Oracle v. Google API copyright case, the Snowden revelations and NSA tradecraft (particularly their hardware implants, automated MITM attacks and interception of Cisco hardware); the upcoming cross-platform version of ASP.NET and Microsoft’s open-sourcing of the Rosyln compiler platform. I'm also interested in systems and network administration and would like to become CCNA-certified in future. I'd love to do public open source development, but unfortunately my employer owns everything I touch or think about while I work for them.

Other bits and pieces...

• I own two cats and am engaged.
• I look forward to watching media from security conferences like DEFCON.
• I dual-boot Arch Linux and Windows 8.1 at home.
• I own, but generally regret the purchase of, a MacBook; despite the number of times it's been the best tool for the job.
• I will shortly be building a Debian-based 10TB ZFS file server (with ECC RAM) and am considering a Xen-based architecture for my next PC.
• My preferred editor is Sublime Text with a package manager, though Github's Atom is interesting.
• I'm a mechanical keyboard enthusiast, using a Mathias Quiet Pro with customised ALPS switches – the quietest mechanical keyboard in the world.
• I agree with Joel Spolsky (an ex-Microsoft employee and co-creator of Stack Overflow) when he says that these twelve points are very important.
• I also agree with Jeff Atwood (the other co-creator of Stack Overflow) on whether using more than one monitor massively improves productivity.

Thanks for reading!