About

Photo of John Leach

John Leach

John Leach is human living in Huddersfield, UK. He makes frequent and somewhat diverse changes to the universe, though isn’t entirely sure where he ends and it begins.

You can e-mail him at john@johnleach.co.uk.


What I’m doing at the moment

I co-founded and run Brightbox, a UK-based “infrastructure as a service” company. You can build cloud servers, load balancers and all that kind of stuff.

When I make the time I also work on one or two personal programming projects too, like News Sniffer.

I’m currently doing a lot of gardening, faffing with home automation and restoring an antique pianola “player piano”.

Things I have played or sung

I’m learning to sing and play guitar at the same time. I’m also learning to play accordion, which is hard enough to play on its own.

I’m one half of the two-piece Robber John, playing all the guitar and singing roughly half of the singing. We play the occasional gig around Leeds. We’re on Sound Cloud and Youtube.

Some of my older solo recordings are on Sound Cloud and Youtube. I also do a few open mic nights around Huddersfield on occasion.

I’ve voiced several characters in the Yorkshire-themed point and click comedy adventure computer game Yorkshire Gubbins.

I was previously in The Gillroyd Parade, West Yorkshire’s one-time second-best three-piece acoustic folk-scifi band (now retired).

With Louisa I started Ukepedia, a project to perform every Wikipedia articles on Ukeleles. Please help.

Things I have written, said or made

Free software projects I’ve been involved with recently

Other projects I’ve been involved with

  • News Sniffer, a project to monitor the corporate media (Ruby on Rails).
  • Leeds Ruby Thing, a local Ruby programming meetup group.
  • Compost This, a database of things you can and can’t compost. (Ruby on Rails)
  • Recycle This, a blog of how to reuse stuff, rather than it going to landfill.
  • Geekz Shop, we (used to) sell geeky stuff, like t-shirts and stickers, featuring infamous geeks (retired now!)
  • West Yorkshire Linux User Group, I (used to) help arrange the meetings and maintain the website
  • Eye Vagina,I pranked some people on chat roulette, which seemed to amuse the Internet
  • Yorkshire Gubbins computer game by Charlotte Gore. I voiced several characters (Terry the robot, Crazy Uncle Harbert, the Barman, Bernard) in the first two episodes.
  • Photography. I used to be a fairly keen photographer and still have some photos on my blog and on Flickr

Family

I live with my best friend Louisa Parry.

I’m a legal guardian of four black cats called Kaufman, Matilda, Ren and Hickory Shagbark and one black, white and ginger cat called Strange.