Hi, I'm Phillip Pearson. I'm a software engineer from Christchurch, New Zealand, now living in San Francisco. Since 2005 I've been working for Bay Area tech companies:
Google - App Engine (Google Cloud Platform)
Mode Media - social advertising and curation
Ning - topic-centric social networks
Yahoo! - Fire Eagle location platform and Facebook app
BBM - white-label social network software
Elsewhere on the web: Facebook | Twitter | Pinboard.
Before my career in web development, I was an electrical engineer (who wrote web sites as a hobby). Since 2014 I've been doing some EE projects in my spare time, mostly involving ARM Cortex-M chips.
- Acorn Electron/BBC Micro retrocomputing - various hardware projects for the British machines that introduced me to computing when I was a kid (2017-)
- Matrix display - a 6 ft x 3 ft LED display for Burning Man (2012)
- Bluetooth-LE controlled LED heart pendants (2014-2016)
- Messing with debug ports: hacking on OpenOCD flash drivers and CMSIS-DAP JTAG support (2016)
- ESP8266 (Xtensa lx106) bootloader reverse engineering (2016)
In the early days of the social web (2002-2005), I made a bunch of things:
- the New Zealand Coffee Review, a site for reviewing kiwi cafés
- the Internet Topic Exchange (1, 2), a site for collecting blog posts on similar topics
- the Blogging Ecosystem, which analysed links between members of blog communities
- bzero, a command-line blogging tool
- Python Community Server, a web server in Python to host Radio and bzero weblogs
- phpStorageSystem, a PHP app to host Radio and bzero blogs (proof of concept, to show you don't need a dedicated server)
- Community Server Wiki, where we used to talk about community servers
I also have some development notes to share from that time.