Ari Sargent

I am Ari Sargent, born 1968 in Christchurch, New Zealand. These days I am a proud Wellingtonian, living in Mt Victoria with my partner, Sascha Német and our three children – Saffron (10), Tallulah (6) and Tintin (3).

I have been a closet geek since I was about 10 (or perhaps earlier), and cut my teeth programming assembler for the 6502 processor on an Apple II computer, and then Z80 machine code on a ZX81 and a Sord computer.

I have tinkered with web technologies as a hobby for a number of years – these days I have settled on cutting the odd bit of PHP code to create various utilities for my own use (such as a Wellington City Library website scraper to monitor all of the kids overdue library books and fines, or my Amazon EC2 hosted digital photo library and a bunch of other stuff – none of it pretty, but all functional to a greater or lesser extent). I would love to learn Ruby/Rails, but realistically with 3 kids I struggle to get in even a tiny bit of app development, let alone learning a new language/platform. I think I’ll just try and learn MVC using Cake PHP in the vain hope that someday I might get time to learn Ruby.

I trained as an electrical engineer, completing an honours degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering in 1989. Since then I have worked in the electricity industry in NZ.

By day I head up Powershop – a job I really cherish. It is a rare opportunity to combine my professional experience in the electricity industry with my personal passion for technology and inner geekiness.

So, it is now 2010 and I really need to get my online presence sorted. I can currently be found everywhere on the web, and nowhere in particular at the same time. Here is the plan to tidy this up:

Personal:

• tumblr.deepthought.co.nz – random and sporadic outbursts.
• Facebook – where I will interact with my “real world” friends online.
• Twitter (@d33pthought) – where I will have conversations and a bit of fun with all and sundry – I will happily follow (and be followed by) people whom I have never met.

Professional:

• powershop.co.nz – where it all happens!
• Twitter (@powershop) – discussion with customers and friends of Powershop.
• Powershop Blog – discussion on Powershop and stuff related to the electricity industry.