Rob Bell

About me

👋 Hi, I’m Rob.

I’m a Principal Software Engineer from London, working with high-scale, distributed systems and the people who build them.

I’ve been fascinated by code ever since I first sat in front of my uncle’s ZX Spectrum, using the lacklustre membrane keyboard to absent-mindedly input pages of BASIC from the manual, before being met with cryptic error messages undecipherable by a 10-year-old me. Undeterred by that experience, I graduated to tweaking config files for games and programs on Windows 3.1 to see what the resulting effects would be—more often than not it meant a format/reload for the struggling Compaq Presario, thrown out by its previous owner, and with only half the memory required to play Doom.

Years later, after upgrading to a powerhouse Cyrix MII-based machine, I started building websites for the school bands I played in and pushed Microsoft FrontPage Express to its limits. A rainy lunch break ended with me being the first person to borrow The C Programming Language from my school library in over a decade, and, a lot of posting to the comp.lang.c newsgroup later, I had the beginnings of a vocation.

I graduated from the London College of Music and Media in 2005, earning a BSc in Multimedia Computing, w/ a BA in Design for Interactive Media. In the 15 years that I’ve been building software professionally, I’ve worked across different industries and even different continents. I’ve built small line-of-business applications and huge scale services; I’ve written code both on my own and as part of groups spanning tens of teams and hundreds of engineers.

Contact me

You can find my personal projects on GitHub, my thoughts on Mastodon or my professional profile on LinkedIn.