Leigh Mannes is a software engineer

Who are you?

I'm a software engineer based in Melbourne with a background in the finance, education and advertising industries. Working across mobile, online and real-world experiential installations I provide analysis, technical direction, development expertise and deployment automation.

I lead the Creative Technology / Digital Reality capability at Deloitte Digital - my team helps create a lot of neat immersive projects sometimes involving AR or VR, usually built with Unity3D.

In the holy war of editors, I back vi (well vim, actually) but most of the time I'll use a dedicated IDE to actually get things done.

How can I get in touch?

leigh at bears toxic chemicals . com
(remove spaces etc. Apologies, trying to avoid having my email address eaten by too many bots)

or over on LinkedIn, for whatever that's worth...

What's the go with the site name?

The full name is actually Bear's Toxic Chemicals and Associated Heavy Industries

You have to know that doesn't help, right?

Sorry. It's a joke involving what a business would be called if a stuffed frog tried to start an empire, and I used that as an official business name back when I was a freelance software consultant. (Note, I didn't say it was a good joke)

Why is this so ugly?

Well, a few reasons really:

  1. The page is about 3-4kb, and so it loads very, very fast. Even on slow connections and old devices.
  2. I'm a sucker for simplicity. There's a million quotes you can pull out on this one: "Good design is as little design as possible" (Dieter Rams), or "...everything should be as simple as it can be but not simpler" (Roger Sessions... sorta) But ultimately why overly complicate something that is just meant to convey some text to you?
  3. There may be environmental reasons to use less data, so I can tell myself I'm doing my bit while kicking back and watching Netflix.
  4. I'm redeveloping my portfolio. The new one will be ugly of course (I'm a programmer, not a designer), but at least there will be images of some of the things I've worked on and some experiments which will be significantly larger than 4kb.

Who is asking these questions?

Erm... maybe you? I'm not sure, but it sure is a fun conceit to structure a page of text around.

Anything else?

Have a lovely day. Seriously. 2020 has been a strange time; you probably deserve a nice day, and I hope you get it.