I’m Paul, a professional software engineer by day and a tinkerer by evening.

I’m an old hand, been at it for 20+years. I’ve worked in and for stock exchanges, investment banks, ISPs, backbone internet hardware management, energy retailers, video conferencing, interactive voice response telephony. Technologies I’ve worked with or designed include spark, hadoop, big data, ultra high performance messaging gateways, stock exchange matching engines and market data messaging apis, public websites, accounting and billing systems, wholesale electricity network messaging platforms. There is a chance you have already used some of my software, directly or indirectly.

In the home automation space, it’s a hobby, but I like to do things my own way. I like to apply what I have learned in my day job over the years to the automation space, I find it a lot of fun to be automating REAL things rather than business processes. I like to go from scratch, designing the circuit, choosing the ICs, soldering the boards, writing the firmware, developing the networking architecture and putting the thing into service preferably without having to rely on too much from other people. I have become lazy recently and begun using SOnOff /ITEAD devices because, I agree with their ethos and I can hack them to do as I bid. It also avoids me having to deal with the mains voltage risks of naive circuits. I’m a software professional, mains electricity is often best left to electrical/electronics professionals.

I do not like “cloud”. There is no cloud. No such thing. It’s just someone else’s computer and in using it, you are almost always signing over your data and your privacy to these people to sell or to use for whatever reasons they choose to, now and in the future. Read the small print. Don’t ask me how I know.

Paul