Simon is a hands-on software architect and has a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Reading. Over the past 12 years, he’s been involved in projects ranging from rich desktop clients and web applications through to highly scalable distributed systems and service-oriented architectures; predominantly within the finance industry. He's also undertaken consulting and training roles with a broader focus on people, process and technology.

Simon is additionally active in wider aspects of the IT industry. Using his architecture experience, he founded the Coding the Architecture website and London user group, which bring together and deliver content for the growing community of hands-on pragmatic software architects. He has also written and co-written a number of books about Java EE web technologies, spoken at a number of high profile software development conferences, developed a software architecture training course and actively maintains a public blog.