Paul Hammant

I’m Paul Hammant and in my mid-40s. I have worked for Thoughtworks as a ‘Principal Consultant’ since 2002, and have been consulting since 1989. As well as being nearly always billable to clients, I generally help Thoughtworks Open Source agenda. No we do not get paid to work on open source! I’m a UK citizen but live in New York courtesy of a Green Card.

As a Thoughtworks consultant, I’ve worked for a US national Bank, a UK-based global Oil Company, an ‘online bank’ (UK only), a global clothing retailer, a popular US budget airline, a search/ads giant, and a financial services conglomerate, where I enjoyed a ‘Director of Engineering’ position. Before Thoughtworks, I was Head of Development at a UK “M-Commerce” startup (freelance then permanent), and a specialist for many years on IBM midrange computers in the Insurance field.

I was early into Java (asking newbie questions on comp.lang.java in Jan 1996) and middle of the field into C#/.Net (2003), and nowadays use Python or Ruby where it’s appropriate or through choice. Sinatra is what I like for web-framework, and I totally love AngularJS given it is pseudo-declarative.

For the entire current millennia, I have been an advocate of Open Source, and eXtreme Programming (XP). I was participating in the former for a couple of years, before I became an advocate of the latter. The two communities feed off each other.