Tom Armitage - a bit more about me


(So: I've got no idea what I to forward for the agenda, but thought I'd throw out a slightly more relevant chunk of information about me in case any of this is of interest, or gives you an idea for questions or things to do. Basically, I'm getting this out of the way before the event so we can talk about more pressing matters at Bookcamp).

 

Hello. You might know me from the internet. I'm really not sure what I'm going to do at Bookcamp yet - probably my usual shtick of turning up, listening a bit, and then weighing in - but I thought it might be worth providing a bit of background on you know, what I like, what I do, what I'm interested in.

 

I work as a software developer and interaction designer (currently at Headshift, although I'm moving on in a few weeks). In a nutshell: I make things on the internet, and I also try to work out how they should work. Most of the stuff I work on could be described as "social software", but it's not all blogs and wikis and stuff like that. It's just software that involves people. The tools I tend to work in are programming languages, diagrams, writing, and a teeny bit of hand-waving.

 

My background isn't really programming, though. I have a degree in English literature. During that time, I played with computers a bit, and started blogging in 2001, which is how I learned a whole bunch of useful skills, read a whole bunch of interesting things, and met a whole bunch of interesting people. Wanting to be a journalist and knowing how to do technical things with computers led to me doing internet-things at publishing companies once I left university; first, working in the online team at the New Statesman, and then building social software for scientists over at the Nature Publishing Group. So: a bit of publishing background, but not book-publishing. And not really a journalist, after all, though I've written a bit.

 

Deep down, I just like making stuff; not just drawings of things, but things you can use. And sometimes, the best way to explore interesting ideas is through silly toys. Silly toys I've made recently - both on the back of twitter - include @towerbridge, which tells you when it's opening and closing, and Twit 4 Dead, in which four bots collaborate and communicate thanks to some very crude simulated intelligence.

 

What else? I seem to be doing an awful lot at the moment about videogames, of all kinds; although my blog is meant to be generalist, a lot of the past few months have been on that topic, but dig into the archives for more of the designy and codey things. And then: narrative, storytelling, photography, play.