Hi, I'm Rik Brown. I've been building software, big and small, for most of my 35 years.

My first computer program was either a Visual Basic 3.0 "app" that made a picture of Thomas the Tank Engine wink at you, or a virtual scrapbook of bad Microsoft Paintbrush drawings of Roman swords and shields (we were learning about the Romans at school).

Either way - I have my Electrical Engineer dad to blame/thank for getting me programming so early. He also didn't approve much of using Visual Basic and soon had me translating examples from a library book about BASIC into Turbo Pascal (his language of choice at the time - maybe still).

I spent the best part of the last decade working for Amazon. This started after they acquired the UK company I was working for (LOVEFiLM - basically Netflix) and I was thrust into the world of billing migrations. Seeing an excuse to move to Seattle, I was soon involved in building out Amazon Video's Digital Rights Management platform, including onboarding Apple's FairPlay DRM. My experience at Amazon culminated in leading a team scaling out Amazon Go - physical grocery stores that use cameras to identify what you picked up.

Nowadays, along with freelancing, I work at Snap, Inc. I own the telemetry client SDKs - web and mobile, with a touch of backend - that log billions of events every second across the various Snapchat apps.

Outside of the field, my girlfriend and I are avid travellers. Often with our small dog in tow. The cats stay home. When not on the road, we can often be found in one of NYC's many restaurants and bars. I try to get back to the UK as much as possible.