About
I’m Sam: a software engineer in London who mostly just likes building things.
I took a non-standard route to software engineering. I trained as a physicist: a PhD at Imperial working on the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, based at CERN for a couple of years, hunting for new physics in rare particle decays. That is mostly a job of separating the faintest of signals from an overwhelming background, which turns out to be good training for nearly everything. Physics led to data science, two years forecasting supermarket demand and helping machines decide how much bread to order. Data science led to the realisation that what I actually loved was building, so I interviewed my way into engineering from the inside.
Off the clock, most of my time belongs to my young daughter, with triathlon training squeezed into the gaps. The racing is on a gentler setting than it once was: two full Ironmans, many halves, and a few 100 km trail races, back before sleep became negotiable. I paint a bit, and I help my partner with the tech side of her business. The newest obsession is astronomy: a small telescope, a heavily obstructed London garden, and a planner on this site that works out when the two can be reconciled.
You might ask about Whiskers. My uncle dubbed me this as a child, long long before the beard. Named after Beatrix Potter’s character Samuel Whiskers, the fierce bad rat.
Words, projects, and pictures will accumulate here.