Who am I

Samuel Lown, a 26 year old freelance agile backend developer and information architect. I create systems that convert data into useful information.

I was born in a town called Beverley (map), in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Now however, I’ve left the green countryside of England for the Spanish capital of Madrid where I live with my girlfriend Lorena. My father lives in a small town, Pinoso near Alicante, where I stayed for a year-out in 1999 before starting University and consequently never looked at England in same light.

I have a Bachelor of Science degree with honours in Computer Science from the University of Staffordshire, where I lived for three years. During this time, I was fortunate enough to have applied and been successfully accepted for a 1 year work placement at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland where I worked in the Unix support section of IT in 2002/2003.

For a little bit more insight into the things that interest me, check out my subscription list in Planetaki.

What I work in

My current programming language of choice is Ruby, a very powerful object orientated programming language which provides the base to one of the best web development frameworks available, Ruby on Rails. While not programming, I also manage Linux servers and avidly support Open Source and Free-software development. My operating system of choice both on the Desktop and Server, is Ubuntu.

It is my view that information is the base of any computing system and must be highly appreciated to be stored, and most importantly, presented according to the needs of the user. I work to ensure data is stored as accurately and securely as possible in databases and computer systems, such that it may be later searched for and provided to those who require it as useful information. Areas of special interest to me include internationalisation and accessibility.

Freelancer

Technically I’ve been a freelancer since February 2005, but it is only now (June 2008) that I’ve finally decided to free-up my timetable and take on shorter-term projects. The following is my plan of action from July 2008 onwards:

• A single long term project which I maintain usually in the afternoon. Currently, this is Planetaki.
• General consulting charged by the hour for creating information systems.
• Highly productive short term projects.

One of the aims of this approach is to split projects into objectives that can be completed in around two weeks with a fully functional deployment. A simplified example to illustrate this could be a small social networking site where the first two weeks are dedicated to handling the design and creating the platform for basic page support, and the second period to the development and incorporation of a forum module. This allows complete flexibility for the client to decide which features they require most, and the option to add to their site at a later date.

If you’d like to get in contact with me, please do so in the Contact section.