Tim graduated from Oxford with a BSc (1st) in Mathematics and Computation. Since then he’s been gainfully employed writing 3D graphics engines for Playstation games and leading the development of build tools and internationalisation projects for industry leaders. For fun he works on a Guitar Amplifier Simulator and the Linux Stopmotion project.
On graduating in Mathematical and Computer Science, David began programming Signal Processing software back in 93. His enthusiasm for interactivity and cross-media publishing has taken him through projects as diverse as Interactive Learning systems and Electronic Program Guides for Cable TV.
James started programming as a child when games were needed for the family Apple, and ended up with a PhD in Computer Science. He worked on the web when it was young and on smartphones when they were new, and he has done stints of system architecture and UI design and evaluation, but always gravitates towards mucking around with code. Still, he loves seeing what he’s created bring a bit of joy to someone’s day.
Managing Director. Prior to joining LShift Mike worked in research, publishing and consulting for some of the best-respected companies in the world as well as for some pretty hectic start-ups. He has built a number of web businesses and is responsible at LShift for helping clients build theirs.
Martin is passionate and perhaps a little too obsessive about user interfaces than is healthy (just one more pixel to the right!). So long as he can write code of some sort he’s happy, but C# is where he’s most at home. He’s a little over-enamoured of the more magniloquent facets of the English lexicon, but he tries not to let this seep into his variable names.
After getting a degree in Computer Science, Olof started off working at start-ups with all parts of the stack from PostgreSQL to Mobile frontends. He has an interest in all things Open Source and Open Data, though most of his pet projects deal with the Common Lisp ecosystem in particular. In another live he played some instruments, though nowadays that’s limited to a bit of tin whistling. He’s also in a bit of a competition to read even more books per year.
Tom first joined LShift in 2010, and rejoined in 2015 after a two year sabbatical. He has a PhD from the Delft University of Technology, and has spent far too much time in academia doing complicated things to small computers. His main interests are in Clojure, Python, Linux and distributed systems, and has contributed to a long list of open source projects.
Alex started to write code during his childhood and got the unquenchable desire to master all things related to computers ever since owning one. He is on a permanent quest for programming paradigm excellence and utilizes a high degree of continuous self-teaching, never fully satisfied. After becoming a certified software engineer in 2007, he worked his way up through a mobile web development start-up to join Nokia in 2010, eventually becoming deeply involved with Big Data. Alex is a strong supporter of the Free Software movement and was co-ordinator of Free Software Foundation Europe Fellowship Berlin throughout 2011 and 2012. He is the first to join John Newby to ramp up the LShift Berlin operation in 2015.
After getting a MSc in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering from Linköping University, Sweden, Joar spent some years developing software for Ericsson. He later decided to return to the university and got a PhD in Computer Engineering. His work focused mostly on code generation and data layout techniques for application specific processors for signal processing. After another brief stint working on distributed low-latency real-time systems for Ericsson, he moved to London and joined LShift. Most of his work to date has been related to various high performance systems of different kinds, ranging all the way from embedded DSPs to cluster supercomputers. He enjoys working with functional programming languages, and especially ones belonging to the ML-family.
Ash has been programming almost continuously since the late nineties, despite the occasional frivolous distraction like reading maths at the University of Cambridge. His interest in making computing more humane has seen him hacking on everything from bootloaders to shiny HTML5 web apps. He’s also an experienced cat-herder which comes in handy on his larger open source projects.
Ian has a degree in Artificial Intelligence from Sussex University and was a research fellow for several years in Human Computer Interaction (User Experience as opposed to User Interface design). He first touched a computer 33 years before joining LShift (and has written software on punch-cards) and therefore knows at least something about many different things. Having won several national amateur Jive championships he now spends some free time rolling around in mud and climbing over things. He no longer wears a digital watch.
Sophie is one of the founders of LShift. She has worked in commercial Internet and new media agencies since 1994 after completing an MSc in Multimedia Systems. During the course of her time at LShift Sophie has been involved with all aspects of the business—everything development to project planning to release management. Her current focus is on usability—working across projects to refine the usability of the software we develop.
Matthew first joined LShift in 2005, returning in 2006 and then again in 2009 when he was able to contribute heavily to RabbitMQ in its formative period. Over ten years later, he has returned again to find not a great deal has changed! In his spare time, Matthew works on distributed databases, consensus and related algorithms and can witter on at length on such topics. He has an MEng in Computing from Imperial College and about two-thirds of a PhD!
Chairman. Andy’s background is in Politics and Philosophy. He has worked with computers since 1987, acting as a Senior Technical Manager and Technical Director for a string of companies from 1993 onwards. He was a founder and chairman of the UK Director User Group (DUG) and has written regularly on Director development.
Lukas is not only a loving father, but also an excellent Software Engineer who manages to write clean and maintainable code while keeping his fellow developers’ needs in mind. After graduating with an MSc in Computer Sciences at Furtwangen University, he started his career at SAP and Nokia Berlin (later HERE) before finally joining the young LShift.de team as an iOS developer.
Client Services Director. Keith’s commercial experience includes a 15 year stint in North America where he took tech companies from initial investment searches through to running international sales and support channels. Most of his technical background has involved firing high energy lasers at inanimate objects, though this changed when he got involved with medical imaging.
Programme Manager. Julian has been involved with technology companies for more than 25 years. Starting as a developer in the financial sector, he moved into project management during a 9 year spell with CMG. Since that time he has operated in a variety of senior and director level positions in medium and smaller software companies always maintaining a focus on effective project delivery.
Systems Director. Stuart has degrees in Mathematics and Applied Computing and has worked as a developer since 1991 building custom web based solutions. He has also built an ISP and Web hosting company. He has experience in a wide variety of hardware, operating systems and programming languages.
Irene is another prize winning mathematician who discovered a love for programming and studying computer science. She worked as a research assistant on compilers and IDEs before getting an MSc in Software Engineering from the university of St Andrews. She has worked at Amazon and more recently Facebook developing the infer static program analyzer. She is a functional programming enthusiast and loves small fast moving teams.
Alan started out engineering things in the physical world. He changed to software engineering in the mid-nineties, by working on energy forecasting with neural networks. Since then he has worked on a great variety of software projects and technologies, including software for transplantation medicine. He is interested in bioinformatics, Python, Open Data and the open sharing of information. He holds a MSc in Software Engineering.
While still at school, Jarek’s talents in Physics and Electronic were recognised in national competitions. He has a deep knowledge of operating systems, especially Unix, and a proven ability to track down and fix problems on any level, from applications down to system libraries. His development experience includes work on projects spanning extremes of scale. He comes to LShift after working at Citrix, NewBay, Google and Sun Microsystems.
Peter got his first computer at the age of 15, and started coding immediately in HTML, JavaScript and Perl on Linux. Despite such a late start he has made up the time, and is now our resident expert in mobile app development on Android, iOS and Windows Phone. In his spare time Peter constructs swimming pools, he snowboards and plays volleyball.
Hubert worked for LShift in London before leaving to do his PhD at EPFL, Switzerland. During his PhD he developed novel techniques for debugging local type inference decisions, and type systems in general. As a core member of the Scala team, Hubert’s functional programming strengths are obvious, he is also proficient with imperative languages. Hubert was a mentor and administrator of the Scala organisation at the Google Summer of Code for 3 consecutive years, and head teaching assistant for the Foundations of Software course for four years. Hubert combines his obvious technical strengths with patience and unflappability. In his free time he enjoys cycling on his road bike in the mountains and blues dancing until late hours.
John studied Computer Science at Queen Mary College, and after working in agencies, ISPs, and development houses was one of the co-founders of LShift in 2000. He left LShift in ’03 to work for Gaydar as their senior developer. John then joined BeatThatQuote.com, a price comparison website and led the technical team there. BeatThatQuote.com was sold to Google in 2011, where John worked until 2013. In 2014 John moved to Berlin and started LShift.de, our Berlin operation.
Starting from an MEng in Electronic Engineering, Pete has climbed the abstraction layers to LShift via a stint designing processors for ARM. He likes fast code and solid architecture but still enjoys messing around with machines and wasting time with friends in the sunshine.
Office & Finance Manager. Having left the circus at an early age she published three books on quantum physics by the age of 20 and moved into the world of musicals, starring in Evita in the West End before getting bored and giving the role to Elaine Page. She has since worked in a variety of finance roles, gathering the gamut of accounting qualifications. Having spent much of her recent working life in the property industry, she has developed her own particular style of working with suppliers. Sarah is an expert at getting things done. Some of these things are even true.
Alex specialises in system integration, messaging, business process management and other ‘programming in the large’ topics. He can therefore avoid getting involved in language debates unless they mention BPEL (and so far they haven’t). In the real world, he has acted as a hands-on technical architect for 60 or so integration projects using middleware and web technologies. ‘Lights out’ automated management and monitoring of systems is his particular interest so he looks forward to the emerging ecology of cloud and IoT services with barely suppressed excitement.
Mike has been programming computers since his parents bought him a ZX81 too many years ago to remember. He obtained a BSc in Computation and has since worked with a wide variety of different technologies on projects including video conferencing, image processing and a range of CD/DVD-ROM titles based on a 3D model of the human anatomy.
Ceri took his first steps into the world of programming whilst still in primary school by programming graphics hacks on a ZX Spectrum. Later, he became fascinated by the world of Internet protocols and Linux. Formerly a systems administrator, he enjoys working with languages such as Python and Clojure, and has interests in administrative automation, photography and spoken languages.
Neil studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh and has worked in various industries; some more nefarious than others. He discovered the joy of functional programming in University when Standard ML was still a thing. Nowadays, he will happily bore anyone who’ll listen on the virtues of Clojure. For some reason, he still thinks Perl is pretty neat.
