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My name is Andrew Nicols. I live and work in Lancaster, UK.
I graduated from Lancaster University in 2007 with a Masters by Research (MRes) in Design and Evaluation of Advanced Interactive Systems, in which I received a Distinction grade.
I also received a BA with Honours in Music Technology in 2006 from Lancaster University.
I currently work for Lancaster University as a
Programmer/Analyst. I primarily work on end user service provision
of Moodle and Mahara, system administration of linux servers,
debian packaging, day-to-day maintenance, design and architecture
design, and various other related work.
As part of my job, I work a small percentage of my time on work for
LUNS,
which is a subsidiary company of Lancaster University.
My job role within LUNS involves a variety of Linux and Solaris
system administration, systems and software programming, packaging,
troubleshooting, day-to-day maintenance tasks, and design work.
I believe in the values of open source software and to that end, I try
to use it and contribute back to it whenever possible.
As such, my choice of operating system for both desktop and server is
Debian Linux
and I have submitted several bugs to the Debian bug tracker as a
contribution to its continued development. I have also helped with and
contributed towards a variety of other open source projects.
I am currently working to organise the Mahara UK 2012
Conference here in Lancaster, UK.
Recently I've been intrigued by the Debian preseed system and have been
working on a way to help automate our installation process by combining
Debian preseeding with our in-house configuration management system.
At present, this utilises Grub2 and a pen-drive, but I would like to
look at the use of a network boot environment involving DHCPd, tftpd
and a PXE boot setup.
I use ViM and git
on a daily basis and I'm also familiar with subversion
though prefer git to subversion.
My previous work have involved deploying Moodle and Mahara to create an ePortfolio system for an estimated 250
schools in the North West.
This involved numerous customisations and alterations to the Mahara
code base, and most of these changes have been submitted back to the
Mahara project.
I frequently work on both Moodle and Mahara to report, triage,
diagnose, and fix issues and have contributed a number of features to
both projects. I am a Mahara core reviewer and a frequent contributor
to Moodle.
I also contribute to the openCSW project and maintain a
number of packages as part of the project.
I frequently code using php and am trying to learn perl to a greater
extent. I also regularly use bash and am familiar with several other
shells, languages, scripting frameworks, and markup languages.
Other projects I have worked on or contributed towards include:
I also work with Apache2, PostgreSQL, Bind, and Squid on a regular
basis.
In the past my academic interests have primarily focused around
Human-Computer Interaction with particular emphasis on multimedia
interactions and large-screen displays.
I am now much more interested in improving user experiences, particularly
for both children and with older users.
My personal interests include playing with computers, listening to and
playing music, travelling, cinema and film, coding, walking, cycling and
skiing.
I play the violin, and clarinet and I also sing regularly. I have also
tried my hand at both the viola and the piano in the past.
Andrew Nicols
