Simon Oram - Lead Developer

I have always been knee deep in code for as long as I can remember, from the moment I got my Commodore 64 back in 1982 at the tender age of 11! I was transfixed and started coding games not long after delving into the delights of assembly language.

Aware that a narrow obsession for lines of code may be a tad bad for my all round intellectual health I did a degree in Anthropology at Durham, and on graduation I got a job researching amongst other things Cremation and Crematoria in the Theology Department there. But as ever I was always working somewhere as a coder. I helped to set up and develop a European wide database (for Newcastle University) for collecting epidemiological information on stroke and later started an MSc in computer science.

I  passed my masters with flying colours picking up the departmental prize for R&D. I then landed a job at Sunderland University where I lectured, wrote papers on HCI and became  developer for the Digital Media Network, the project that would go onto to become Codeworks.

Spent a couple of years managing a software team at Codeworks then left to set up a web company that would finally evolve into ElectroSoup at the beginning of 2006 with Nat Hardwick.

Coding Obsessions /
Zope/Plone, python, Ruby on Rails, Design Patterns, OO Design, UML, AJAX

Other Obsessions /
Heideggar, Foucault, Star and Shadow Cinema, running and Annual Film Festival, Open Source Software

Last Read /
Kafka on the Shore - Murikami

Currently Listening to /
The Gulag Orkestar - Beirut