Hi, I’m Sam. Let’s just get this out of the way: un­less you’re from Belgium or the Netherlands, I don’t ex­pect you to pro­nounce my last name cor­rectly. My girl­friend can’t, so why should you? I’d rather we just im­me­di­ately go to be­ing on a first name ba­sis. Again, I’m Sam.

I’m a physi­cist by train­ing, but af­ter hav­ing spent the last decade do­ing physics, I de­cided it was time for a change. Academia may have left a bit­ter taste, but it un­de­ni­ably fed my pas­sion for cre­ative prob­lem solv­ing and find­ing ef­fi­cient so­lu­tions to tough prob­lems, be­cause some so­lu­tions are more equal than oth­ers.

I’m a self-taught soft­ware en­gi­neer who first started build­ing things on his par­ents’ old com­puter back when CSS2 was the hot new thing, and every­one was get­ting ex­cited about XHTML. Remember XHTML? Technology has been a pas­sion ever since. Though I still oc­ca­sion­ally dab­ble in the odd physics sim­u­la­tion and still read maths text­books be­fore bed. For fun.