I was born in Cork, Ireland, and have lived most of my life there. In school, my best subjects were English and history, but somehow I ended up becoming a scientist. I didn’t take study that seriously until college and spent most of my school years focused on rugby, hanging out, and terrible creative projects.
In college, I studied food science. In my third year, I did a six months internship in Aberdeen, Scotland, where I worked in research and development. I enjoyed corporate R&D, but also looked forward to doing more in-depth research when I got back to the university. In my final year, I did a research project that I would eventually publish, a process I enjoyed so much I started thinking about doing a PhD for the first time in my life.
I started the PhD right after graduation. Doing the PhD was a great experience. In particular, I liked writing articles and trying to find new ideas even when it seemed like everything had already been done before. I also started teaching around that time, which I liked more than I had expected. In my second year, I won a Fulbright scholarship, which allowed me to live in the US for a year, where I continued my research at UW-Madison, Wisconsin.
Soon after getting my PhD, I took an academic position. For almost eight years, I did a lot of teaching, published many papers, and won some grant money. During that time, I completed a degree in philosophy, initially to support teaching concepts in ethics and epistemology to science students. A side effect of studying philosophy was that I became really interested in software, because I loved the logic and AI classes.
At that point my interests had deviated from that of my department and I could no longer see myself continuing to work in food science. To learn more about software, and improve my chances of getting a job in that area, I started another degree in computer science. Around this time, I applied for a job as technical author at Canonical. Incredibly, they hired me. I’ve been working there ever since and have met some wonderful people. After about two years in the job, I got my computer science degree.
In my spare time, I:
- Read difficult books that take me too long to finish
- Write essays and stories that mostly go unpublished
- Make music with obscure samples and found sounds
- Try every piece of software that I can get my hands on
- Threaten to do some game development projects