About

Hi! I'm Bill de hÓra, the author of this site.

Bill

Contact

You can contact me in the following ways:

Work

I'm deeply passionate about software, the business and process of software development, and web technology. I can be characterised in my approach as a specialising generalist. Although I'm primarily a technologist, I take a keen interest in the business and use of software - efficient development processes, cost effectiveness and ease of use. Quality is an overused word these days, but for me, good software is synonomous with high quality engineering work. Part of my "mission" is to find ways to lower engineering costs in a world of tighter and tighter deadlines without jeopardising quality.

My nominal role these days is Engineer, which as hands on as it sounds. At the moment, I deal in high-end web based systems for mobile2.0/web2.0 and product development. In the past I've worked on messaging systems, document management, legislative systems, web servers, CMSes, n-way integrations, technology research, client apps, event based systems, company evaluation - all sorts of things really, for Government and private sector. My CV isn't online, it's available on request.

I currently work for Newbay. I don't speak on their behalf or act as a commercial point of contact. If you have a business inquiry there, I can pass you onto the right person.

Interests

I have a strong interest in using Internet standards, open source and open formats to solve business problems When it comes to technology I concentrate on cost-benefit and appropriateness rather than pure technical value. In particular I'm interested in using technologies like Atom, Atom Protocol, REST, XML, ODF, Microformats, RDF, XMPP, HTTP, and platforms and languages like LAMP, Java, Python and Ruby to economically solve both large and small scale integration and content management problems. I'm co-editor of the Atom Publishing Protocol, and editor of the HTTPLR reliable messaging specification.

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. A lot of what I do takes place online; my online nick tends to be dehora or sometimes bdehora. More detail about me is available via Google or Yahoo.

I have a long standing interest in applied artificial intelligence, mainly around machine learning, software agents and the semantic web. I think with another five or so years of infrastructure build out and especially as we generate more and more data, some of that might become extremely useful - and none of it will be called machine learning, software agents or the semantic web. That's how artificial intelligence tends to get applied:)

Reading and Writing

You can see the kind of tech books I read via flickr. I'd love to write technical books, but can never seem to find the time to knuckle down. Some day! In the meantime my weblog journal is where most of my writing activity takes place, with occasional essays on lesscode.org.

Home and family

I live in Dublin Ireland with my partner Orla and our 3 children.

Mind the Bumpy!

Background

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 clubs to product designer before ending up as a research developer with InterX, where I found my vocation lay with software. In 2001 I returned to Dublin to raise my family.