About

Andy Piper - Boule de Cristal 2010 Andy Piper is widely known as a Social Bridgebuilder and speaker, and is a Developer Advocate for Cloud Foundry working for VMware.

He is an enabler, a synthesiser, a connector, and a community-builder.

about this BLOG

The Lost Outpost is Andy’s personal blog. Most of the time you will be reading his musings on topics related to his work, life, technology, the web, and photography. This is a wide spectrum of topics – particularly since “life” could cover anything and everything that catches his attention!

As well as this personal weblog, Andy also contributes to mqtt.org, the site for the community interested in lightweight messaging for mobile and telemetry applications; the Eclipse Paho project, part of the machine-to-machine working group at the Eclipse Foundation; and Home Camp, the home hacking, automation and green technology community.

BIOGRAPHY

Andy Piper is part of the VMware Developer Relations team, and works as Developer Advocate for Cloud Foundry, the Open Source Platform-as-a-Service.

Andy is probably best known online as a “social bridgebuilder” spanning a number of areas of technology and interest. His weblog The Lost Outpost reflects the diversity of his skills and interests: development, design, communications, everything social, community building, marketing, gaming and digital imaging. He has been a co-host of podcasts including the weekly Dogear Nation podcast (search for it on iTunes), Games at Work, and the Ubuntu UK Podcast; is one of the organisers of Home Camp; and is a committee member, organiser and former speaker at Digital Surrey.

Andy is a regular speaker on various topics, ranging from digital culture and virtual worlds to social software (slides on SlideShare). He is a STEM Ambassador and is keen to promote computing and technology education to schools and universities in the UK.

Andy was previously with IBM Software Group for more than 10 years, as a WebSphere consultant, strategist, and WebSphere Messaging Community Lead.

Andy is a Chartered IT Professional member of bcs, the Chartered Institute for IT.

Andy holds a Master of Arts (Oxf) in Modern History from Brasenose College, Oxford University, in the UK.

For images, please see Andy’s Lanyrd bio page, or visit this Flickr set:

Alternatively, check the tagged photos on Flickr. Should you wish to use any of the images from Flickr please respect the relevant licenses and seek permission from the owner / credit appropriately when doing so.

TECHNICAL BACKGROUND

Andy’s extensive technical career began with several years working with distributed middleware technologies such as MQSeries and DCE for the UK Post Office. He developed broad experience with enterprise computing environments using a variety of platforms and standards. He then moved to IBM Software Services for WebSphere, where he worked with customers to help with implementations of WebSphere products, as a specialist in the messaging and integration families within the WebSphere portfolio; and later joined the Hursley lab, IBM’s primary European laboratory, to bring his field experience back to the development teams.

In 2012 Andy joined the VMWare Developer Relations team to work as a Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry platform.

Andy’s experience with Linux and open source software stretches over fourteen years. Currently, he is community lead on the Eclipse Paho project; and actively works to improve quality and usability of Ubuntu projects through participation in the community and bug reporting. He was previously a volunteer contributor to the Linux Open Client used internally at IBM. Further back in the past he  helped to manage projects such as OpenUT, Anjuta and GnomeSword / Xiphos.

In the dim and distant past, Andy coded applications for Acorn computers running the RISC OS operating system, and had a small business providing educational software to UK schools.

INTERESTS and LINKS

Andy’s interests include photography, music, video editing, and travel. His passions are varied: history; scuba diving; gaming; computing and digital literacy in education; Open Source hardware and software; home hacking; electronics such as Nanode and Arduino; maker culture; LEGO; independent music; science fiction; and cinema.


Andy on Google+

You can find out more about Andy and his interests from these other sites:

There is a bit more information about when, how and why Andy started blogging back in his first blog entry (which isn’t actually the first entry by date, but there’s a reason for that…).

PRESS, INTERVIEWS, and OTHER COVERAGE

[NB from Jan 2009 to July 2011, Andy was a regular co-presenter on the Dogear Nation podcast, so only the earlier appearances are listed here]

CONTACT

You are welcome to contact Andy via email, by phone on +44 20 3287 1302 (SkypeIn / voicemail), on Skype (andypiperuk), or on Twitter (@andypiper).

Please note that if you wish to pitch a link, subject or review for a blog post, or make some other connection with commercial implications, you should read this post about the review policy on this blog before making your approach. I also have a very simple policy on guest posts. Due to WordPress.com hosting policies, I cannot accept advertising. Thank you.