Bio

I was born in a small town in North Yorkshire, England, in the third quarter of the 20th century.

The first year of my life I remember was with a traveling circus in which my mother was the fire-eater. Ever since then I’ve loved creating spectacle: using whatever talents and materials are available to create something slightly outside the normal world we inhabit.

When I was a little older, I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, my adopted hometown. I’d lived there less than a year when a movie called “Star Wars” became a huge hit, and literally changed my life. Some of my friends wanted to be Princess Leia or Luke Skywalker, but I dreamed of creating those alien worlds and creatures.

In 2001 I made it from London to California to work on visual effects for Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light + Magic. I got to work on around twenty Hollywood movies, including a couple of Star Wars prequels. It was a whole adventure.

In 2014, a friend of a friend approached me about an idea for Heirloom, a startup in the social photography space. I was ready for a change, and everyone else in San Francisco was doing it, so why not? It was a fun year — working out of the top floor of a converted warehouse in the heart of SOMA, near the SF Giants ballpark. Coffee shops on every corner bustling with tech entrepreneurs and their Macbooks.

When Heirloom was acquired, I surrendered to Silicon Valley big tech. I helped get YouTube running on hundreds of millions of smart TVs, games consoles and set-top boxes. I led the team that developed the camera, editing and effects for YouTube Shorts. I spent some time at Netflix helping build a virtual animation studio in the cloud.

Now I lead engineering for Cloudflare’s Media Platform: Images, Stream, Realtime and Cloudflare TV. We run global media services at large scale, built on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform and edge network (over 300 points of presence around the world). Everything on this site is built and deployed with Cloudflare and Astro.

When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with family and being in nature. I like sketching and taking photographs — there’s some images on the site.