About Me

I am a veteren web-developer. I wrote my first web site in 1994, and have been working as a professional web programmer in Vancouver since 1996, making me one of the most experienced web developers on the planet. Currently, I am a partner & technical lead at Pencilneck Software, a software development company I co-founded in 2003 along with Jeff Schafer.

I was born in Toronto, Ontario, and lived there more or less uneventfully until 1995, when I moved to Vancouver to attend UBC. I graduated in 2001 with a degree in French Literature, after spending some time in a variety of other majors including history, film, creative writing and even computer science.

My professional work has consisted largely of working for progressive organizations and companies – in the past 14 years, I’ve worked for such amazing groups as the David Suzuki foundation, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the BC Federation of Labour, Enterprising Non Profits, the Canadian Bone & Marrow Transplant Group, and the Canadian Heart & Stroke Foundation, as well as the websites for COPE‘s election campaigns in 1999 and 2002 (both now offline) and, of course, Vision Vancouver‘s website.

My professional work also enabled me to meet my wife, Leah, whom I met while working for a local company here in Vancouver. We were married in 2003 in a small ceremony in Stanley Park. In May 2005, we welcomed our son Liam into the world. It was his arrival that in many ways was a catalyst for my getting more directly involved in politics.

My desire to enter politics has been a slowly percolating process – influenced in part by my own family, as my grandparents were active in the British Labour movement, and my older brother Stuart, who studies labour & education policy whose idealism and commitment to progressive change is a constant inspiration to me. But more than anything, it was the birth of Liam, in 2005, that has crystalized my desire to try and act directly in politics. With his birth, things that were theoretical problems, like the lack of childcare, or youth programs, were suddenly direct, stark problems that I was faced with.