(( I use 2 brackets to do side band comms not part of the interview. I'm at work at the moment so may be delayed in responding from time to time but lets go
So our readers have read a few of your posts, and already some interview, but now it's time to tell us more about you. So where are you and what do you do for a living?
Well I live in Watford, which is just outside London in England. I'm mostly a contract computer programmer (on contract to a bank in London at the moment) but I also do freelance writing. The writing is both fiction (although I've not made any money on that yet) and RPG adventure modules.
Which is reflected in your overall network profile, where your participation in StackOverflow and Worldbuilding is pretty high. I have seen that your worldbuilding reputation recently overpassed your stackoverflow one, is that a result of a higher focus on the fiction writing part?
That's actually a surprisingly complex question to answer. When I started on Stack Exchange I was very active and hit 20k rep in a few months.
By that time though it had begun to feel stale, it's rare that I see a question and don't immediately feel like I've already seen it three times. I've already unlocked every privilege there is to unlock so more reputation doesn't really give me anything except for a bigger high score which isn't really a big motivator for me. I rarely ask questions there as usually my own knowledge and searching existing questions finds the answers I need rather than needing to ask new ones.
On Worldbuilding though there are always so many ideas and possibilities and some really creative discussions. There's a much bigger and more interesting problem space to explore. What's more with the site being so much newer fewer of those questions have already been asked.
Even here though I took a step back after a few months to let some other users come to the fore. When the site was first being established every question and answer was really important to get things flowing. Now I can sit back and appreciate what everyone else is doing instead of driving things myself and pick and choose when I want to ask or answer.
A guy I both worked with and was playing in his online Pathfinder RPG with was one of the backers during the commitment phase and told me about it. I was one of the hundred who committed before the Private Beta started and then helped define the site during the Private Beta.
We've got a good mix of people with different skills and experience including prior moderation experience on other sites so it's been remarkably painless. We make a good team and for the most part the site runs itself, our community does a good job of handling most issues without us needing to intervene at all.
I think it's a side effect of how reputation works and certain questions being very good at gathering reputation. I've got a strong science background and a keen interest in both sci-fi and fantasy so I can cover most areas on the site to some degree or other.
Not exactly. I've written some short stories based on Worldbuilding questions and have another planned but I'm very short on time at the moment. I'm not sure if you would class it as fiction but I'm in the middle of writing the third in a series of Pathfinder adventure modules, the overall world for that is already built but there are a lot of details (including entire countries in some cases) to fill in.
For answers I've written so many that it's hard to choose but I did enjoy the fact that my off-hand suggestion of Ragnarok here worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2625/… sparked much discussion and several follow-on questions.
And that realistic world was very great. I also joined in that series. And I have also noticed that your two last questions that you mention here are also the most popular to date. Effect of experience?
Partially, I was pretty confident they would both be popular although the scale of the response still caught me by surprise a bit. Writing a compelling title that also follows the site guidelines, describes the question, etc is definitely a skill that can be learned and improved upon.
This is, in my opinion, one of your hardest question, so there are no reasons you could escape it. Is there any particular member of our community you look up to?
I can't name a specific individual as there are so many. People who do really detailed science based answers with all of the mathematics needed to solve it. People who contribute to the site by spend time in the review queues, or to the community by doing things like running the blog or the tag challenges. People creating adverts or just taking what time they can to write amazing answers to questions. And there's more than one person fitting every one of those descriptions!
