Tim learned to code to assist with humanitarian disasters around the world from New Zealand. He's been tinkering with computers ever since. His area of professional expertise is in natural language processing and machine learning. Tim's also the author of Rust in Action, an introduction to Rust for programmers who have never used a systems programming language.
He works at TCDI, an American legal services and cybersecurity company, as a Senior Software Architect. Tim is part of a small team building a distributed text search system for petabytes of data. He has also had prior experience at Canonical and multiple data science consultancies. His work has generally involved developing systems that could handle lots of data while being easy to deploy and administer.
Perhaps surprisingly, Tim's academic background is outside of computer science or statistics. He holds a Master of Public Policy and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Philosophy and European Studies from Victoria University of Wellington. He hopes that this can signify to others from non-traditional backgrounds that their place in the technology industry is valid and valued.
An advocate for open source and open culture, Tim releases most of what he produces on his own time under an open licence. As well as writing code, he makes occasional contributions to iNaturalist, OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. His hobbies include generative and pen plotter art.
The easiest way to connect with Tim is via Twitter. He also hosts regular Rust tutorials via YouTube and Twitch.
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Tim McNamara
Senior Software Engineer
Amazon Web Services