Peter Hilton

About

Peter Hilton in detail

Peter Hilton is a software developer, writer, speaker, trainer, and musician. Peter’s professional interests are business process management, web application development, functional design, agile software development and project management. He currently works as a developer and technical writer for a process management product company, and also delivers the occasional lecture and training course.

Peter’s software development interests include business process management, web application frameworks, software crafting, functional design, and agile software development.

Peter has presented at several European developer conferences, including ACCU, Scala eXchange, Devoxx, Øredev, Jfokus, Javazone and GeeCON. Peter co-authored Play for Scala, Manning Publications and is a certified trainer for Fast Track to Play with Scala.

Now & next

Peter consults for Signavio, and is available approximately one day per week for consulting, training and speaking opportunities.

CV

Peter’s CV consists of his bio (above) and his profiles on LinkedIn, Github and Stack Overflow.

Writing

Peter started writing in 1996, to provide content for his first web site when he started experimenting with web technology. This was back in the days when web pages had transparent backgrounds and you could see the grey metal of the web browser behind the text. His early work focused on cafe and restaurant reviews, written during a period of travel and working overseas, punctuated by periods of idleness and reading books in cafes.

Peter developed an interest in technical writing during his work as an IT consultant, leading to what some might call a perverse appreciation for the joy of software project documentation. Meanwhile, he specialised as a web application developer, reading all of the W3C specifications of the time and applying their ideas to business application software.

In 2004, Peter joined Lunatech Research in Rotterdam and published technical writing for the first time. The next five years saw a stream of articles on the company blog (http://blog.lunatech.com/) mostly technical, but occasionally straying into other areas, including project management and cocktail recipes. Meanwhile, Peter was using Java-based open-source stacks to build enterprise web applications: it was only a matter of time before technical writing, project documentation would lead to writing documentation for open-source frameworks.

Peter started writing about the Play framework in 2010, first on the Lunatech blog and later by making direct contributions to the framework’s official documentation as a committer. In the beginning of 2012, the Play 2.0 release brought more contributors to the open source project, notably from Typesafe, at which point Peter shifted his focus to working on his first book.

History

  • Six-month sabbatical in London (2014)
  • Working (as software developer) for Lunatech Research in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2004-2014).
  • Working for Logica NL, which later became LogicaCMG, in Rotterdam (2000-2004).
  • Working for Logica UK (1996-2000). Assignments included SmithKline Beecham in Surrey (1999), ODCCP in Vienna (1999), SES-Astra in Luxembourg (1998-1999), CSC Computer Sciences Ltd in Cambridge (1997-1998), EUTELSAT in Paris (1996-1997).
  • Three years studying pure mathematics at the University Of Bristol (1992-1994, 1995-1996).
  • Ten months as an Erasmus student at l’Université de Bordeaux I and studying French stuff at the Maison du DEFLE (1994-1995).
  • Lots of Monday nights working at Avon Phototypesetting Ltd (1994).
  • Four or five terms working on Epigram, the University of Bristol Independent Students’ Newspaper, back in the days before newspapers had web sites (1993-1995).
  • A long summer holiday working as a deck-hand on board the Aran Flyer, helping tourists in Ireland across Galway Bay to the Aran Islands.
  • My first year of university living in Churchill Hall, University of Bristol (1992).
  • Six years going to school at Boundstone Community College (1986-1992).
  • Four years at Thornberry Middle School and a few years at what was then South Lancing Primary School (1979-1986).
  • Moved from Kent to South Lancing, West Sussex, UK (1977).