About

About

I am Richard Hall.

Surrey, UK. Available for remote roles and contract engagements.

The Short Version

First Class BSc in Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence. Over a decade working across data and application integration on every continent except Antarctica. Two director-level roles. Two companies founded. One community scaled from 36,000 to more than 50,000 active members. Tutorials, vodcasts, live talks, and enough broken builds to fill a very honest portfolio.

If you want the longer version, get in touch and I will send it over.

How I Got Here

It started with the film WarGames. I was eight years old and utterly convinced that computers were, fundamentally, the most interesting things in existence. That conviction has not really shifted.

Before university I took a few years out and fell sideways into software almost by accident. I ended up at a software house whose reporting product was used by 10 Downing Street. I had specialised in the reporting system, and one day they needed urgent changes made to the travel expenses reporting for the Prime Minister's office. They sent me in. Alone. I spent two days in a computer room the size of a cupboard, wedged under the stairs. The smoking room was in a similar cupboard under the stairs next door. The fact that both the IT room and the smoking room were tucked into cupboards under staircases should give you a reasonable idea of roughly when this took place. On one trip between the two I walked past Tony Blair coming down the stairs. Another clue to the period. I quit smoking not long after that, which may or may not be related. On my last visit I kept the numbered fob from my assigned pigeon hole out of the wall. Number 44. I am a Lewis Hamilton fan, so I notice these things, though I should be honest: I took that fob before Lewis had started in F1. The number means nothing and everything depending on whether you enjoy finding fateful connections in random objects.

Then I went to university. City University, London. First Class Honours. Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence, before AI became a word that appeared on every marketing slide. My dissertation was on something that sounds entirely obvious now but was not obvious yet: linking photographs to the precise locations where they were taken, by matching the timestamps on SLR photos against GPS coordinates gathered by an early mobile phone, with audible narration recorded alongside. The interesting part was using AI to smooth out the erratic GPS data from early mobile hardware and then annotating both photos and narration onto Google Earth. Google built something very similar into their own products a few years later. I choose to take that as a compliment rather than a missed opportunity.

I took the first job I applied for after graduating. It was supposed to be a practice interview because I was not sure the role was quite right for me. During the interview I got on well with the partners, and when they asked whether I would be prepared to spend six months working in South Africa as my first project, I was sold. What followed covered most of Europe and the Southern hemisphere. I lived in Australia for the best part of a year. Every continent except Antarctica, which remains on the list.

In 2013 I joined Talend as a Senior Professional Services Consultant. Hands-on delivery for complex enterprise accounts, selected as the only UK consultant at the time for high-priority international deployments. I then set up my own consultancy and ran that for a few years, before being asked to come back to Talend in 2019 to run the Community. By the end I was Director of Community and Support Innovation, running a global developer community and a support transformation function simultaneously. The community grew from 36,000 to more than 50,000 active members. We delivered $2.1M per year in support cost deflection through self-service. I produced the Between 2 Bits vodcast series, the Job of the Week tutorials, and whatever else was needed to make developers actually want to show up.

After Talend I joined BigPanda as Head of Community, built their community from nothing to 50 percent customer representation inside a year, and proposed a GenAI/RAG integration to put community knowledge directly in-product. Then the market did what it did in 2024 and I found myself with time to build things.

So I built things.

What I Have Built Since

The Builds page tells the full story, but the short version: a geo-mathematical web app with a proprietary 3D coordinate system, an LLM hallucination detection game built on Ollama and LangChain and Temporal, a gamified diabetes data visualisation tool, a multiplayer puzzle game, and several things that started as "that is a weird idea" and ended up somewhere genuinely interesting.

This is not a gap on a CV. It is the most honest possible demonstration of how I actually work.

The Bits That Do Not Fit Anywhere Else

In my teens and early twenties I spent more time on stage performing in front of hundreds of people than I spent behind a keyboard. I follow Formula 1 with the kind of commitment that probably requires a formal apology to everyone around me. I share a profound similarity with Rafa Nadal on a tennis court, mainly an extreme propensity to perspire but not the brilliance of his open stance forehand. I live with my partner Gemma in Surrey. I automate our home with Home Assistant and have the YAML to prove it. In fact, I will probably start writing about it very soon.

I do not think any of that is irrelevant. The people who are genuinely good at developer advocacy tend to be curious about everything. The curiosity is not a personality quirk. It is the actual mechanism.

If You Are Here To Hire Someone

I am open to remote/hybrid roles in Developer Advocacy, Developer Relations, Developer Evangelism, and adjacent functions. I am also available for fractional and contract engagements with products that genuinely engage me. The home page explains why the "genuinely" matters.

My CV is available on request.

You can reach me on LinkedIn OR Get in Touch here!