Andy Wilson- Managing Director
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 companies from 1993 onwards. He was a founder and chairman of the UK Director Users Group (DUG) and has written regularly on Director development.
Matthias Radestock- Technical Director
Matthias has a Ph.D. and M.Eng. in Software Engineering from
Imperial College and is the author of several papers in
international journals on distributed system coordination and
programming languages. His commercial experience during the past
decade includes directorships and senior technical roles in
several Internet technology companies.
Stuart Mottram- 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.
Mike Rowlands- Executive Director
Prior to joining LShift Mike consulted on digital
communications and Internet strategy for six years, working with
some of the best respected companies in the world. Over this time
he has built a number of web businesses and is now responsible at
LShift for helping clients build theirs.
Julian Burns- 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.
Elaine Lynch- Office Manager
Elaine turned down a university place to become a nanny in the
US. Back in Dublin she worked in retail and learned about customer
service and staff management. She then became a receptionist for a
corporate travel agency, and within three months had moved into
the accounts department. She then took on the roles of Office
Manager, PA and Accounts Administrator - 'Jill of all
trades'.
Michael Bridgen
Michael's favourite moment in software so far is producing a
graphical IFS editor for the Atari ST while at high
school. Michael has a B.Sc. in pure mathematics and computer
science, and (hence or otherwise) has been earning a living in
digital computing since 1998. His computing interests orbit the
ideal of making digital tools for better living, except when they
don't.
Sophie Clare
Sophie was one of the founders of LShift and has worked in
commercial Internet and new media agencies since 1994. She has an MSc
in Multimedia Systems which, like her work at LShift, focussed on
interface design and development, and project planning and delivery
management. She manages to spend so long sitting at a desk by doing a
lot of yoga outside work.
Tim Clark
Tim trained as an electrical engineer and then pursued a career
in research investigating applications of genetic algorithms in communication
networks. Since then he has worked with a large number of moribund
technologies such as X25, EDI and CORBA. He started working with
Java in 1996, when it was much simpler than today, and has written
far too much Java for companies large and small.
Lee Coomber
Lee has been programming computers since age five when he
was literally happy to work for peanuts. He has a B.Sc. in
Artificial Intelligence and has been developing Internet
applications since 1996. He joined LShift from design agency Lateral where he
was Technical Director and has since taken a sabbatical to provide the same
service for online accountancy firm Crunch.
Paul Crowley
Paul's varied computing background ranges from papers on
cryptography and cryptanalysis at highly regarded conferences,
through innovative algorithms for fast voxel computer graphics, to
rendering for print media and precise satellite navigation. He
loves scripting languages, Unix, Internet technologies, and open
source software.
Martin Eden
Martin is currently studying Computing, and is 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.
Tony Garnock-Jones
Tony has a BSc in Computer Science with a minor in
Biological Science. His main professional experience has been in
telephony, despite a strong interest in cognitive science and
other bleeding-edge topics within computing. In his spare time he
has contributed to open-source projects in audio processing,
programming languages and web tools.
Ben Hood
Ben joined LShift after contributing to the
RabbitMQ project. His most ambitious IT project was to install a sensor
on the cat flap on his back door that could use pattern recognition
to allow his own cherished Siamese through and block the big black cat
from next door. Not unlike most of the SAP-style projects he has been
involved in, by the time that the sensor was integrated and had passed UAT,
winter was afoot and it was too cold for his Siamese to
venture out at all.
Vlad Alexandru Ionescu
Vlad's interest in computers started when his parents bought him
an i386 when he was 5, which he quickly took apart. At school, he
used to hack file formats and write MS-DOS hardware drivers to use
in the 3D graphics engine he was working on, since his parents didn't
get him a proper internet connection. At university you would have
found him advising friends in higher years on their projects and
submitting his coursework in assembler.
David Ireland
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.
Paul Jones
Paul has been playing with computer hardware and software since the
age of five, successfully deploying his first commercial project at
the age of 16. Since then Paul has juggled work as a full time
developer with studies in Software Engineering, and an MPhil in Ambient
Information Display. He has worked with and contributed to
many Open Source projects and likes finding the right tool for a job.
Emile Joubert
Emile studied Mathematics and Computer Science before cutting his teeth
in the publishing and online media sectors. He particularly enjoys working on
multi-disciplinary projects and programming challenges with a mathematical
flavour. When he's not computing you might find him kite flying or playing
Go.
James Kearney
James is reaching the end of a Computing degree at Imperial but is
already no stranger to commercial projects. He likes C#. When he's not busy
getting A grades, or working at LShift, he likes reading, anime, playing games,
cycling, sailing and more programming.
Simon MacMullen
Simon graduated with an MSc in Advanced Computing in 1999 and walked straight into the height of the dot com bubble. Oddly the experience didn't put him off. He joined LShift after being Technical Lead at a design agency and is relishing working at a company where the conversations don't revolve around kerning.
Marek Majkowski
After fruitful encounters with such diverse topics as programming industrial robots or exploiting every hidden feature of TCP/IP options for tracing networking traffic, Marek settled for 'scalability' as his main field of interest, one that he attacks with a magic sword labeled 'asynchrony'. Marek enjoys London, though he had to trade riding motorbike in Warsaw for daily commuting by tube. Marek likes to keep asking 'Does it scale?'
Hubert Plociniczak
Hubert's experience in computing is intimidatingly huge, including knowledge of everything from Python to Haskell via Flash. He studied Maths, Computer Science, Economics and English at the International Baccalaureate school in Poznan before taking an MEng at Imperial College. Be nice to him, or he may demonstrate his skills in Aikido for you.
Michael Porter
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.
Matthew Sackman
Matthew has been programming since he was eight and is
currently studying for a PhD Computing. He is involved in
many areas of computing from system administration to type-theory
in functional programming languages. He is most at home dealing
with shared resources between several hundred concurrent
threads. In his spare time he works on open-source projects
developing strange new file systems or programming
languages.
Alexander Schmolck
Alexander is a fully qualified emacs operator who likes several obscure
programming languages and films. He also used to know some cognitive science
and read books, but still remembers a little about pattern recognition (he
even got a PhD after he learned to stop worrying and love The Mathworks®).
David Wragg
David has enjoyed programming since childhood. His main interests are
programming language design and distributed systems, but he is up for any challenge involving computers. Prior to joining LShift, David lived in Moscow for several years and wrote software for oil companies. He doesn't miss the oil industry, but he does miss Russian winters.
Tom Parker
Tom has a PhD from the Delft University of Technology, and in general has spent far too much time in academia doing complicated things to small computers.
His main interests are in embedded systems, Python and Linux, and has contributed to a long list of open source projects.
