Hi! I'm Bill de hÓra, the author of this site.
I currently work for Zalando as an Executive Principal Engineer. I've worked as an engineer and product manager on messaging systems, commercial APIs, document management, legislative systems, web services, CMSes, integrations, technology research, mobile, event based systems, company evaluation - all sorts of things really, in SaaS, eCommerce, Telco and Government.
I have a strong interest in using Internet standards, open source and open formats to solve business problems. For me, good software and moving quickly is synonymous with high quality engineering work and impact. I'm passionate about software systems and can be characterised as a specialising generalist.
In a past life I served on the W3C RDF Working Group and briefly represented my previous employer on the Servlets and JSP expert groups. I'm co-editor of the Atom Publishing Protocol, and editor of the HTTPLR reliable messaging specification. I have a long standing interest (and degree) in artificial intelligence, mainly around applied machine learning and knowledge representation.
I was born in London, and spend my teens in Galway, focusing exclusively on sports, before moving to Dublin to go to Art College and then back to London to live and work. I have degrees in Industrial Design from NCAD, Dublin and Artificial Intelligence from U. Westminster, London. I've worked a gamut of jobs, from undertaker's assistant to builder to bartender to designer before ending up as a research developer, where I found my vocation lay with software. In 2001 I returned to Dublin to raise my family.
I live in Dublin, Ireland with my partner Orla and our 3 children.