About Me · Tom Bower

This page is about me. For more about this site itself, check out the colophon.

Hi! My name is Thomas Bower¹, but I prefer to go by Tom. Some people just call me ‘Bower’ — that’s also fine.

I’m a Yorkshireman by birth but have been living, studying, and working in the great city of London since 2015. London is where I call home (for now, at least).

Professionally, I am currently working as a senior software engineer at a financial research company. I’ve worked in and on various interesting teams and products, and with dozens of technologies in my time there — far too many to list comprehensively here. You can contact me or ask for my CV if you would like to know more specifics.

Outside of work, I have a pretty wide-ranging selection of hobbies and interests that keep me very busy. In addition to programming hobby projects, I enjoy:

cycling (both as a means of transportation and for recreation — track my rides at /rides),
gardening (mostly edible herbs and vegetables from seed, but flowers are nice too!),
cooking (I save some of my favourite and well-used recipes on /recipes),
foraging (such as my yearly bramble foraging and subsequent jam-making ritual),
travelling (with a bucket list that seems to grow faster than I can prune it),
learning new (natural — human!) languages (I’ve been studying Japanese since around 2012 and would describe myself as fairly comfortably conversational, and I have also been learning Mandarin Chinese more recently),
writing (a contributing fact to the existence of this very website, I suppose. I also have a few niche ideas for non-fiction books that I occasionally add to, but whether I’ll ever get round to developing those ideas more remains to be seen),
and a whole lot more — this list is by no means comprehensive. In fact, I’ll
take an interest in almost anything if it’s new to me — learning is fun.

One reason for hosting and maintaining this website is that I’m trying to revive the web I remember from my formative years (roughly 2006–2012). I miss the days of everybody nurturing their own particular ‘corner’ of the internet, and the heterogenous nature of it all; Back when you’d have a dozen different forums bookmarked and an RSS reader full of eclectic topics all on wonderfully unique websites brimming with personality.

I’m also trying to limit my use of social media and be much more intentional about the type of media I consume and how I choose to consume it. As well as that, I’m trying to take back ownership of my own data — that’s why you’ll find my writing, photos, book reviews, bike rides, and so on here. I might choose to publish these things elsewhere too (such as Goodreads for my books or Strava for my rides), but ultimately it’s my data so it lives here first and foremost².

I still ostensibly have a small number of social media accounts, but seldom check them these days. If you wish to contact me, your best bet is either through this site (via WebMention), or by email.

The photograph of me on the homepage was taken outside the stunning Gergeti Trinity Church in Georgia in March 2014 — Georgia is a gorgeous, hospitable country and I highly recommend a visit.

You might also like to know what I am up to now.

That’s /ˈbaʊ.ə/, or in other words: ‘bow’ rhymes with ‘how’, not ‘low’. ↩
This is what’s known as POSSE in the philosophy of the IndieWeb. ↩

Footnotes