About Me

Who Am I?

My name is John Hamelink and I am a developer & founder born and raised in Scotland.

I live in the beautiful city of Glasgow, but I also find myself in Edinburgh, London, and further afield from time to time for work or pleasure.

I'm currently working as Sr Backend Engineer for a financial tech company.

I love listening to and collecting music, cooking, and looking after my plants.

This website is my personal blog, where I share thoughts on Software Engineering and Politics.

What do I do?

A software developer by trade, I work with people to design, architect and implement software projects, solving real world problems, creating amazing experiences, and building better tools for the future.

Broadly, I work with end users to establish what they need, I design a solution that fits the problem, I implement that solution, and then I test how well it fixes the problem.

The languages I am most proficient in right now are Elixir, Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Bash, Python, and Emacs Lisp.

I’ve worked with businesses in the Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Life Sciences, Sports, Gaming, Alcohol, Live Music, Advertising, Media, Financial, and Customer Service industries over the years.

I’ve worked with individuals to make their vision come true; I’ve been drafted in last minute as a contractor to fill a gap in a critical team just before January sales; and I’ve been appointed as an acting Chief Technical Officer of a small startup - to steady the reigns until a full-time replacement could be found.

When I’m not building products for other people, I contribute to open source projects such as Diplomat. I’m an avid Emacs fan (checkout my configuration if you dare), so a lot of my contributions are focused among that ecosystem. I do limited amounts of pro bono work for organisations which I care about. From time to time I also do one-on-one mentoring and coaching if the technology or project interests me.

Who am I working with?

Among many others, my client list includes:

MedicBleep

Financial Cloud

Sequoia Capital

Find a Player

The European Commission

Arnold Clark

Tennent’s Lager

Contact

For general inquiries, or to discuss a project, please email me at me <at> johnhame.link

About this site

This blog is written in Emacs, using the ox-gemini plugin, allowing me to write my articles in org-mode, and publish them with gssg. The website is deployed to Source Hut as a static site.

I'm still working through some teething problems, but I should be able to automate the maintenance of this blog :)