He graduated in Computer Science at Royal Holloway in 1988.
Dave presenting, after a couple of glasses of red wine, at FailFest15 where honest people fess up to software projects that went badly wrong. He, uh, had a number of projects to choose from.
Dave started his CompSci here in 1985 in the portcabins behind the computer centre (core unit was in Algol68, on the Vaxen), and finished in 1988, by which time the department had moved into the futuristic wonderland which is McCrea. He went straight on to work on HOLMES, the computer system used in police incident rooms at the time (the Unisys implementation he worked on was written in... Pascal (oh yes)).
He came back to the department as a young visiting lecturer for three years to present one year of VLSI, and then two years of COBOL (oh yes). Then it's all a bit of a blur: artistic projects (he's worked as an illustrator and writer) and programming work (for RHUL-CompSci-rooted start-up Yospace: WAP (oh yes) and online video), and then teaching in a girls' school in Bangkok (he ended up spending around seven years in Thailand). Then he fell in with civic coders mySociety and ended up being one third of their international team, travelling widely (e.g., Paraguay and Liberia) helping local activists set up open source civic tech projects. Somewhere in all this he did art (books and online projects) too, including the UK's first webcomic in 1995. Oh, he lives at the bottom of Egham Hill, which is convenient.
One reason that Dave chose Royal Holloway in 1985 was because he was told a famous aikido teacher had a club here. Not only was it not true, but that particular teacher died before Dave arrived so it was never going to happen anyway. However he still practices, and is rudely taking this opportunity to point out that there is an excellent aikido club in Egham and Staines where he regularly practices (there are three teachers (two of them women, one of them Japanese)). Beginners always welcome. Aikido is the pure maths of the martial arts world.
Sometime in the 1990s he was commissioned to produce the Royal Holloway Board Game. You didn’t know there was such a thing because the project got scrapped after he'd done all the artwork. There was also a time when the college shop sold postcards that he had illustrated.
