Hi, I'm Sam Phippen. I'm a human that enjoys writing software. I'm currently studying for a masters of engineering at the University of Bristol in Computer Science. When I graduate I'd love to use my hacker powers for good, and work with Fun Theory.
More interesting than my degree though is the stuff I get up to in my spare time:
Talks
This is a talk that earned me the title of "student robo-creator-evangelist". It's a talk about some work I've done for Student Robotics. I've done this talk in lots of other places including Bathcamp, the University of Bath and UBU Auction of promises 2010.
This is a talk I gave about why videogames are awesome and why you should play them.
Projects
Gröw
Gröw was a videogame I built as part of Global Game Jam. I met a bunch of strangers and in less than 48 hours (significantly less, because we didn't have 24 hour access to the space) built a videogame with them. This was great for me because I got to work with designers, artists and musicians and I really enjoyed the collaboration. I was the only programmer on the team and the end result was a fully working game. I had a really great weekend but I was severely burned out by the end.
Lighting London
This was a little fun project to attempt to project information about where people in london are onto a map. I mined the 4square api in order to get the data and lit it using a simple c program. The source code is on Github
Facebook Cover Pix
FBCP was a freelance project, and I had a great time whilst building it. The idea was to build a simple gallery system for people to upload and share timeline cover pictures. I built all the javascript and the backend server that does this and as part of it learnt to use the Facebook api.
Misc
I have a Blog. One of my posts got reposted by A much larger site.
I was the University of Bristol Student's Union "Student Ambassador of the Year" for 2010-2011 for outsanding public outreach work.
I was Time magazine's person of the year in 2006.