in gravyland

About Graeme Sutherland:

• Graeme’s CV (PDF)

I’m Graeme Sutherland. I’m an enthusiastic and positive systems architect, systems engineer, general technologist, and writer with a broad set of skills that all seem to be something about people communicating with people. No matter what I do with my life, I seem to end up either involved with writing, publishing, or building communication systems. This started from a love of electronics which turned into ham radio. At school, I just couldn’t stay away from computers or student newspapers.

At university, I studied communications engineering — telephones and radios mostly. I worked on computers, designed hardware and wrote lots of software. And while all this was going on, I cut my teeth on the sales floor of a computer shop and was deeply involved in student politics, mostly supporting all student’s educational needs to the university.

Since university I’ve traveled widely and worked in Silicon Valley, London, Northern Europe and Perth. I’ve written Unix kernel drivers, messed with X windows, managed software development teams, been a systems architect, management consultant, a technology consultant, supported sales teams, architected all sorts of systems including a global digital money system. I’ve built and sold a major software product. I’ve worked for several years in building automation technology.
I’ve been working for myself for over ten years as an independent systems engineer and consultant, both in the UK and Australia.

These days, I’m co-founder, CTO and COO of social recommender startup Scouta.com and the founder of yet another small new web consultancy, Presence Labs. All at the same time I work for a worldwide investment bank building and maintain global systems for pricing bonds and interest rate swaps.

Technology-wise, I spend much of my time writing Java and Python. I’m deeply but practically in love with Python, especially for online applications. Perl and PHP are good, old friends as well, though. I operate several web servers based on Debian linux and FreeBSD. I grew up using Unix, and I guess that it is one of my loves. The good old Unix command line feels like an expressive canvas to me. But I like my tools beautiful, so when Apple released OS X, I came back out of the wilderness and got a new PowerBook and then an iPod and then… you know the story.

I’m happily married and deeply in love with Libby and our family is completed by our Bea, who is, amazingly, six, and a constant joy.

Blog History

This here gravyland was called middle~path until late February 2005. And up until March 2007 this was purely Graeme’s blog. But since March 2007, Lib and Bea are joining in too, to make it a family thing.
It was time for a change. gravyland is a bit more personal and a bit less focussed on technology. More me and less ‘me trying to be clever’. I do that other places :-)