Who is Rob Sheppard?

Its very hard, at least for me, to describe who you are…I tend to fall back onto the usual crutch of describing factual things related to education and work, things that actually don’t adequately describe who you really are, but I had to write something, so here goes…

I was born in Gloucester and now live in East London; I studied Physics (BSc) and then Computer Science (MSc) in Birmingham; I have worked in Cheltenham, London, Glasgow, Sacramento, Minneapolis;

My post-graduate IT career started with the C programming language, and I spent 20 years as a C++ programmer working on financial trading systems at investment and commercial banks, both as a freelancer and an employee.

In 2017 a reorganisation at my current employers meant I had to move internally and I am now working in Big Data as a Software Engineer, involving Hadoop, Hive, Hbase, Spark and more.

I’ve had a long term interest in photography, and even called myself semi-pro at one point when I worked occasionally for a Russian fashion magazine,  and my images were published by Vogue and bought by a large advertising agency, but I realised that I did not like being told what to take photos of,

My interest in SEO stemmed from photography, when I was running an online image library and trying to compete with other “one man band” photographers, who at the time had not cottoned on to optimising their websites.

My interest in quantum physics is fairly recent, despite reading physics at university, which I was quite bad at anyway. Its grown since hearing and seeing radio and TV programmes explaining the quantum world for the lay-person, and finding out about practical applications for explaining phenomena, especially in the natural world.

Latest Posts: