The Personal Webpages of Mark Fowler

This site is two short planks, my personal website. The name is based on the old English idiom for something stupid ("as thick as two short planks") and seemed like a good idea at the time back when I was a lowly student and Alta Vista was the pinnacle of web technology.

I've had this site for nearly thirty years (since sometime in 1996) but for most of it's life it's contained little more than my contact details and my curriculum vitae (CV) / résumé. Most of my writing for that quartre century has been elsewhere on the web (for example, in the Perl Advent Calendar, which for throughout the years I've written several books' worth of material).

About Mark Fowler

Hello. My name is Mark Fowler.

I've got several claims to fame; For example, back in 2006 I worked on Zimki, which many people claim to be the world's first PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering. I'm infamous enough my email address is already on your Mac (I know this because Apple installs it there at the factory). I've played football (soccer) with Barry White, been driven around by the Stig, been Time Magazine's person of the year. All of this, and more, I expand on on my Fun Facts page.

It's possible that you might know me in Real Life™. Right now my family and I are splitting our time between Chippenham, UK (down the road from Harry Potter's house and parts of Hogwarts) and Chatham in upstate New York.

I grew up in Chippenham, attending Frogwell and Hardenhuish School. I attended both Imperial College and the University of Bath. While I worked in London at Profero (doing New Media during the dot com boom), Fotango (making Zimki amongst other things), and Photobox (saving Christmas by introducing bursting to the cloud), I was heavily involved in the Perl community, being the leader of the London Perl Mongers user group and speaking at several Perl conferences a year. After that I lived in New Lebanon in upstate NY, Richmond in western Massachusetts, and in Chatham, NY, working for OmniTI/Circonus (doing observability tooling, OmniOS, and helping with the Surge conference), MaxMind (working on their geo-location and fraud prevention systems), and at CircleCI (doing cloud type stuff - including a bunch of cost optomization work - for their CI/CD product). If you've ever crossed paths with me (or just wish you had) and are now reading this...reach out via the contact page and say hi.