About Noah

I grew up in St. Thomas, Ontario, and spent most of my career in London, Toronto and New Brunswick. I live in London, Ontario with my wife and son. I’ve had various roles over the years, and currently work as a web project manager for an agency in London, Ontario.

I have been passionate about programming since adolescence, starting with BASIC and Turing, and built several websites for freelance clients. I studied Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress in the late 1990s, and worked in graphic design and print production for six years. I worked in the internal marketing department of a sewing and craft wholesaler. I later started Biped Design, a business in Toronto specializing in design work for print and web. After moving to London, I took a position at an agency before deciding to return to college. I have diplomas in Computer Programming from Fanshawe College and Electronic Desktop Composition from George Brown College.

When I was much younger, I wanted to be a cartoonist. For about three years I created a weekly strip that I shared with family, teachers and friends. I have returned to illustration again as a hobby and am re-learning some techniques.

I have a particular interest in open data, presenting an overview on open data at an UnLondon conference and providing industry advice while on a panel of open data advisers for a MISA sponsored OpenGov event. I have become involved in the resurrected CivicTechLondon, a tech and design-centred civic organization in London, Ontario. I have been involved with a number of events in the London area. One project involved liberating restaurant inspection data and plotting the results on a map, the functionality eventually duplicated on the health unit’s website. Another project was a weekend hackathon where I participated with a group of strangers and colleagues to build the LondonTrash web app which identified the garbage pickup date by postal code and sent an email the night before. I won top solo entry for the City of London’s 2012 budget app contest by creating a web app that graphically represented budget areas according to departments and interactively dig further into funding details. The budget app used the d3 graphing library and json data originating from imported spreadsheets.

The bulk of my programming experience has been with PHP-based content management systems, such as Drupal, WordPress and Joomla, as well as experience with a wide variety of commercial and opensource platforms and ecommerce solutions. More complex systems have been built on PHP-based MVC frameworks, most recently Laravel, C# and ASP.NET, MySQL and MSSQL, jQuery and HTML5. Most of my experience has been with the LAMP stack (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP), a bit with the MEAN stack (Mongo Express AngularJS and Node.js) and a few Android apps in Java.

This blog is a writing outlet for various things that interest me. A lot of my thoughts centre around futurism, politics, technology and humour. I try to be honest and fair in my posts, and maintain a reasonable amount of objectivity while exploring. I would appreciate being contacted by anyone wishing to use the content on this website.