I'M UNCOMFORTABLE TALKING ABOUT MYSELF

In Short

I’m Matthew Bate, currently living near Midhurst in Sussex, but will leave for a nomadic existence post-Covid, should such a time come to pass.

An eclectic career. At fifteen I got a summer job in a warehouse and family circumstances turned it into a career. I became a management trainee at a builders merchants until my kidneys failed at twenty-one. That was the last of the major mishaps, except for the bank thing.

After a year or two in-and-out of hospital, for which my employer sacked me, and during which I read a hundred books on computer programming, I got a computer.

Further frantic bursts of employment lead me to help solve the problem of ship-board computers in the pre-internet age, and subsequently help develop cloud computing.

Here's the fun bit. In short, I co-founded a company which developed a hybrid p2p/client server object cloud with the ability to plug live into multiple disparate sources and distribute to any client device, with strong typing and granular security. We funded and built the product through angel investors, then borrowed money from a bank to launch. The bank took the money back out of the account and destroyed the company.

It took us ten years to get them to court, where we won, and they settled for an undisclosed sum. I sold my patents, retaining an exclusive license.

I find myself building projects from scratch and am having a lovely time of it. Have a prod 'round, see if there's anything you fancy.