My name is Alasdair Allan, and these days I'm in charge of writing things down at Raspberry Pi.
I’ve actually had a pretty odd path to where I am now, I’m on my third, maybe fourth career now. I started as an astrophysicist, doing research into the high-energy physics of collision shocks in accretion disks surrounding white dwarf stars. But then I sort of drifted sideways into playing with the toys.
After spending a few years building an agent-based system to schedule a network of robotic telescopes, I became interested, and did a bunch of work around, machine learning and what later became known as Big Data. I spent a lot of time investigating the “data exhuast” and data that lives outside the cloud, in embedded and distributed devices. Which is how I got interested in cellphones and microcontrollers.
In fact I got really rather interested in sensors and mashing them together with the, then new, smart phones. I ended up writing a few books about that, including one on how to get RS-232 devices to talk to an iPhone, and it was during this period in my life that I was responsible for causing one of the first big privacy mobile privacy scandals, which later became known as "locationgate." This caused a US Senate hearing, and got me a mention on South Park. A decade later, I'm still not sure what to think about that.
I then spent a few years as a technology journalist for the most part writing, and talking, about the maker movement and the sometimes new (and sometimes recycled) things that were happening there. Laterly, I also did a bunch of work around the new Tiny ML movement, the folks attempting to cram machine learning inferencing onto microcontrollers, and while I was doing that I spent a lot of time talking to the folks at Raspberry Pi.
Which is how I ended up where I am today, heading up documentation for Raspberry Pi.
It all sort of made sense at the time.
You can find me on social in the following places: