Peter Hilton

About

Peter Hilton in detail

Peter Hilton is a product manager, software developer, writer, speaker, trainer, and musician. Peter’s professional interests are B2B SaaS products, no-code automation, agile software development methods, and software documentation. He currently works as a product manager, and also delivers the occasional lecture and training course.

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, 2013) and certified to train Fast Track to Play with Scala around the same time.

Product management

Peter focuses on product management, where the combination of his technical background and business experience give him more leverage in creating and maintaining excellent software products than working as a developer or development manager.

CV

In addition to his LinkedIn profile, Peter’s product management CV is available on request. Peter’s developer CV additionally consists of his profiles on 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.

Play for Scala by Peter Hilton, Erik Bakker and Francisco Canedo was published by Manning Publications in September 2013. The book teaches web developers how to use the Play Framework to build web applications using the Scala programming language.

97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know edited by Kevlin Henney, Trisha Gee, with contributions by Peter Hilton, published by O’Reilly Media in May 2020.

History

  • Working for as a product manager (since 2020).
  • Consulting for Signavio as a product manager, consultant, trainer, pre-sales consultant, technical writer and developer (2015-2020)
  • 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).