a brief history of rhiaro

This is an overview of what I have been doing with my life, from a traditionally capitalist / productivity perspective. For more details about all of the things, and others besides, in a slightly harder to read formats, see posts tagged cv.

See also my statement about availability for work and a personal review of my last decade.

Sort CV by type of experience.

2018—present

Web Standards Editor Digital Bazaar (remote)

• Editorial work; turning WG consensus into specification text; issue triage and processing; PR review.
• Contributions to Verifiable Credentials Data Model 1.0, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) 1.0, DID Specification Registries, did:web DID Method Specification.
• Early work on Encrypted Data Vaults specification.

Data Standards Developer Open Data Services Co-operative (remote)

• Python developer, providing supportive tooling for public good open data standards.
• Contributions to Cove, flattentool, Kingfisher, declared., ...
• Experience with Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), Beneficial Ownership Data Standard, International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), Open Active, Realtime Paged Data Exchange (RPDE)
.

2017—2018

Investigative Data Engineer OCCRP, 1 year (Sarajevo, Bosnia)

• Python developer, working on tools for investigative journalism.
• Contributions to aleph (structured and unstructured data search engine), memorious (crawler framework), followthemoney (data model and processing tools), various crawlers, data aggregation and linking, data cleanup, and supporting infrastructure, and documentation for the aforementioned.

2012—2017

PhD in Informatics University of Edinburgh, 4 years (UK)

• Thesis: The Presentation of Self on a Decentralised Web
• Publications:
  • Kleek, MV., Murray-Rust, D., Guy, A., O'Hara, K., Shadbolt, NR. Computationally Mediated Pro-Social Deception. (2016) CHI
  • Kleek, MV., Smith, DA., Shadbolt, NR., Murray-Rust, D., Guy, A. Self Curation, Social Partitioning,Escaping from Prejudice and Harassment: the Many Dimensions of Lying Online. (2015) WWW 2015 Companion
  • Kleek, MV., Smith, DA., Murray-Rust, D., Guy, A., Dragan, L., Shadbolt, NR. Social Personal DataStores: the Nuclei of Decentralised Social Machines. (2015) WWW 2015 Companion
  • Guy, A. Roles & Relationships as Context-Aware Properties. (2014) Context, Interpretation and Meaning workshop at the International Semantic Web Conference
  • Guy, A., Klein, E. Constructed Identity and Social Machines: A Case Study in Creative Media Production (2014) WWW 2014 Companion

Visiting student in the Decentralized Information Group CSAIL, MIT, 1 year (Boston, USA)

• Contributed to the Solid project with software and specification development
• Contribted to dokieli, clientside authoring and annotations tool
• Publications:
  • Contributor: Verifiable Credentials Data Model 1.0 (REC) 2019
  • Author: ActivityPub (REC) 2018
  • Co-editor: Linked Data Notifications (REC) 2017
  • Editor: Social Web Protocols (NOTE) 2017
  • Maintainer: ActivityStreams 2.0 namespace
  • Linked Data Notifications (2017) Web Standards Column, net magazine, issue #296
  • Capadisli, S., Guy, A., Lange, C., Auer, S., Sambra, A., Berners-Lee, T. Linked data notifications: a resource-centric communication protocol (2017) Proceedings of the Extended Semantic Web Conference (Best student paper award)
  • Capadisli, S., Guy, A., Verborgh, R., Lange, C., Auer, S., Berners-Lee, T. Decentralised Authoring, Annotations and Notifications for a Read-Write Web with dokieli (2017) ICWE Application track
  • Capadisli, S., Guy, A., Lange, C., Auer, S., Greco, N. Linked Research: An Approach for Scholarly Communication (2016) ACM Hypertext
  • Sambra, A., Guy, A., Capadisli, S., Greco, N. Building Decentralized Applications for the Social Web (2016) WWW 2016 Companion

Team Contact for the Social Web Working Group W3C, 1.5 years (Boston, USA & remote)

• Coordinating the progression of W3C standards-track documents; herding cats.

Junior Data Architect BBC, 4 months (London, UK)

• Python developer, working on tooling for the cross-departmental linked data platform infrastructure, including libraries, scripts and documentation for data processing, disambiguation, aggregation.

Teaching assistant, lab demonstrator and marker various, University of Edinburgh, 2-3 years (UK)

• Multi-agent Semantic Web Systems, School of Informatics: designed and marked courseworks; responded to Masters student queries around RDF, SPARQL and general Linked Data principles.
• Dynamic Web Design, College of Art: taught PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to Masters students with a variety of educational and cultural backgrounds.

Co-founder, Prewired Edinburgh-based under 19s coding club, coordinator & mentor, 2 years

Mentor, Young Rewired State annual under 19s hack weeks, annually for 4 years

Community coordinator Open Knowledge Foundation, 3 years

Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, annually for 3 years

El PresidenTea SocieTea, UniversiTea of Edinburgh, 2 years

Moderator, Freegle Edinburgh, 1 year

Swap shop volunteer Swap & Reuse Hub, Edinburgh, 2 years

2011—2012

MSc by Research Interdisciplinary Creative Practices University of Edinburgh, 1 year (UK)

• Dissertation: Location-aware literature
• Classes included: Advanced NLP, multi-agent Semantic Web systems, critical media theory, and creating collaborative interactive art exhibitions

Teaching assistant, lab demonstrator and marker University of Edinburgh College of Art, 1 year (UK)

• Dynamic Web Design, College of Art: taught PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to Masters students with a variety of educational and cultural backgrounds.
• Digital Media Studio Project, College of Art: supervised Masters student project that used Responsive Web Design to hide clues for an interactive treasure-hunt type game.

Developer and research assistant, Community Hacking Project University of Edinburgh College of Art, 6 months (Edinburgh, UK)

• Wordpress plugin for a location-constrained community noticeboard as part of a hyperlocal digital newspaper.

2008—2011

BSc(Hons) Web Technology University of Lincoln, 3 years (UK)

• 1st Class (1:1) degree classification
• Dissertation: Developing an online collaborative community
• Awarded Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme grant for Project ParrotDJ

University Programmes Intern Google, 3 months (London, UK)

• Worked on internal administration tools for recruiting, awards, and managing outreach events to universities, and trained non-technical staff to use them.

Web design and development University of Lincoln Students' Union, 2-3 years (Lincoln, UK)

• General marketing and communications support, including poster, flyer and web design, web development, database systems setup and management, and technical staff training.

Founding President University of Lincoln Computing Society, 1 year

Communications Officer University of Lincoln Scifi, Fantasy & Horror Society, 2 years

Poop-cleaner (etc) Weirfield Wildlife Hospital, Lincoln, 1 year

Earlier than 2008

Web developer Freelance, 2005—2013

• Work with local and national (UK) businesses, charities and individuals as a consultant, designer, developer or a combination of the three.

Tech stuff

• Python: including Flask, Django, pytest, and building APIs (8 years)
• PHP: mostly for unprofessional hacking around (11 years)
• Docker: for production and development, including docker-compose (5 years)
• PostgreSQL / MySQL: nothing fancy (10 years)
• RDF, SPARQL, JSON-LD: for various projects (9 years)
• ElasticSearch: for a couple of projects (3 years)
• i18n: translation workflows for code and documentation (2 years)
• Travis / Github Actions: for various projects (3 years)
• Documentation: I like to write docs before the code
• HTML / CSS: since the beginning of time (20 years?)
• JavaScript: mostly small scripts with vanilla JS (12 years)
• nodejs: not my favourite (occasionally over 5 years)
• Java, C#, ASP.NET: learnt during undergrad, did not retain

Working in public and on open source code is important to me. See also my github profile.

Other things

Travel: Since 2016 I have been nomadic, travelling from the US to East Asia having given away whatever I couldn't carry. I came back to Europe in 2017, and have been continually downsizing my backpack since. In 2018 I quit flying altogether and continued to travel around Europe by land and sea. My favourite places to be are in the Balkans. See posts tagged travel.

Food: I am an ethical vegan and a massive foodie. I love to cook, and also being a food tourist. Recommend to me vegan restaurants in your area any time. See posts tagged food.

Zero waste: So far as possible I only use secondhand material goods, and consume zero-waste or eco-friendly things with low carbon footprints. I volunteer to support related initiatives when I can. I publicly log everything I acquire/consume.

This blog: Runs on a platform called sloph, built from scratch in PHP on top of a MySQL-based triplestore. I use it as decentralised Web standards testing grounds.

Writing: I like to write fantasy and science fiction, but haven't finished any yet. Most years I take part in National Novel Writing Month.

Contact

See contact information here.