About

Welcome fellow geeks and hackers! This blog as been a long time coming, and I eventually got some downtime so decided to kickstart things by actually setting the blog up in the first place. So, why another blog? Well, why not, the internet could always do with more ramblings about software engineering, why not have another one?

I'm passionate about good software, and I don't mean just well written, but well executed, full rounded software. The saying "there are many ways to skin a cat" is both terrifying, and probably true (albeit I've never tried), and certainly applies to software development.

There are so many blog posts, stack overflow posts, forums, chat rooms, mailing lists, google groups, it's sometimes hard to know where to start. The first thing you need to know is what you're looking for? If you don't it's like going to the supermarket hungry, you'll end up with lots of crap you don't need, and you'll be missing the essentials like bread and milk.

My idea for this blog is to showcase the best software practices, great tools to make your life easier, and new cutting edge frameworks and libraries so that you are able to make the best software you can. It'll also give me an avenue to surface some of the cool things I've been working on, all open source of course :)

##About me

So, why should you care about what I have to say? And who am I anyway? Well, good questions, let me try to answer.

Why do you care? The simple answer is, you shouldn't care, really, but I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, we all are, so if you learn something new that you didn't know from this blog, then I call that a success. I'm passionate about software engineering, and love to learn new things, an I believe every software developer should be continually learning, it can only make you a better programmer (assuming you're learning the right things).

Who am I? My name is Oli Griffiths, I'm from the U.K. and I started tinkering with computers, as most software people do, when I was a kid, and my fascinations grew from there. Through school and university I learned more and more about the field, from the software to the hardware and everything in-between. I love tech, not just software, anything technical peaks my interest.

I graduated Exeter University (U.K.) in Internet Engineering BSc in 2006, and formed and grew a startup The Organic Agency in the digital marketing space. I was in-charge of tech, and the companies software offerings and development team, building and supporting a wide array of projects and clients from the NHS to Adobe & Microsoft. My primary area of expertise was full stack PHP and full stack frontend (JS/CSS/HTML).

In 2013 I left Organic Development to join Expand The Room, a digital createive agency based in New York. Seeking new challenges and larger clients, my role at ETR has grown to now be heading up mobile, both native and web at the company.

After Expand The Room I left to Join Tumblr as a Senior backend software engineer working to deliver performance improvements and backend framework architecture.