About me
Hello, I am Paul 👋
I live in Norwich, UK. I have also lived in London and New Zealand.
I'm a software engineer, amateur analogue photographer, drum player, Pokémon fan, and prolific note taker.
What am I up to right now?
Find out on my Now page.
Software
I write software. Almost entirely in Python.
My favourite technology is probably HTTP. I like to explore how we use it with Hypermedia, to build brilliant web services, particularly APIs. I think HTTP is a technology that we often forget about because of too many abstractions.
When I build web applications I tend to use Django. Though I’ve also used Flask and FastAPI a fair bit too. I’ve been using React, TypeScript, and HTMX a lot on the front end recently.
My career has mostly focused on internal customer tools - the “back office” functions that aren’t always seen by the average consumer. I’ve developed a knack for befriending and building trust with internal customers and teasing requirements out of them.
I'm currently a Lead Software Engineer at Kraken Tech, the technology behind Octopus Energy and other major energy utilities.
Software projects
Hyper Personal Software
I build a lot of tools tailored just for me, following a personal manifesto.
I call this type of software hyper personal software. HYPS, or ”hyps”.
If it was an emoji it would be 🦛
You can read the manifesto on the Hyper Personal Software article.
PokeAPI
In 2014 I created PokeAPI to demonstrate good HTTP API design. At the time, nothing like OpenAPI existed. PokeAPI was supposed to be a "pure" HTTP API with hyperlinks to other resources.
However, it got more popular due to the subject of it's data - Pokemon. It now has well over 10 billion API calls a month. I'm not kidding! Over the years the project has grown and a whole community of volunteers help keep it up to date.
Other projects
- Paulblish transforms my markdown files into this website.
- Pauldot is a dotfiles / aliases / tools manager that keeps all my zsh alias, dotfiles, and tools in sync across my computers.
- GB Eng is a tiny CLI tool for displaying live statistics about the UK Energy grid.
- Pydefuddle is a Python implementation of defuddle to cleanly extract the key content of any html as markdown.
- Calcifer is a minimalist Raspberry Pi-based temperature sensor network that can operate with many nodes around a local network (such as your own home).
Photography
I also take photographs. I would consider myself an amateur photographer. I like to use old analog film cameras. And Toy Cameras too.
My avatar is shot on an analogue camera! [1]
You can view some of my favourite photographs on this website.
Drumming 🥁
I play the drums.
I love music. I often find myself tapping along to a beat if I can hear one. Later in life I realised this is a "stim"[2] that I do, and I have channelled it in being a good rhythm keeper.
Nintendo 3DS & Pokémon
I absolutely adore the Nintendo DS/3DS era of handheld consoles. I think it is probably the best handheld console of all time. That's a sentiment shared by a lot of people.
I'm also a big fan of the Pokémon series. So much so that I built an API for it that got popular.
I currently own 5 different consoles from that era. They are all different models, different software, and even some modded ones. I'll document them on here sometime.
Writing
As you see, I like to write a lot. I rarely publish what I write, though.
I’ve blogged for years. Tearing down a site when I get bored, then starting up a new one later on. The same will probably happen to this content.
I write quite frequently on my substack - mostly about film photography.
Articles on this website are more software / personal focussed.
Digital copy isn’t permanent. So I journal a lot in hand written books. I hope to one day read them back and reminisce.
I've also been writing a novel on-and-off for about a decade now. It's a cyberpunk / solarpunk / modern space age kinda thing. Maybe one day I'll chuck up some of the content on here so people can read it.