I’m a quirky blonde sysop who has been building and participating in online communities since the BBSes of the early 1980s. Currently involved in several major online community projects: leading an EvE Online gaming community of adults who support our values about behaviour and language in a notoriously uncivil space, and teaching university-level classes to adults online at The Open University in the UK.

My love of online communities, teaching, and gaming has inspired my research in motivation and learning by groups of adults in massively multiple online games like World of Warcraft and EvE Online. My long involvement in online communities drives an ongoing passion in fostering commmunities and learning what makes them thive, whether that’s attitudes, tools, or policies.

I started programming in the 1980s in Apple BASIC and somehow didn’t stop.I’ve been working on the web since the early 1990s when I built my first database-driven website for an academic journal. Since then I’ve been a system administrator, web app developer, project manager, Q&A tester, database administrator, systems integrator, and general technical jack-of-all trades.

Even though I’m still regularly writing code and running more IT services than most small companies, I stopped working in the IT industry about 2010. I’m therefore not as current on modern frameworks, tools, and languages as I should be, learning them as I need them. In 2018, I finally gave in and learned how to at least deploy Docker and Composer projects, and am currently in the middle of a project exposing me to the joys of OAUTH and Swagger. I have a sneaky suspicion Ruby and Node.js, beyond just reading them, are ahead for me still this year.