Maria learned about the book trade at John Smith & Son during the 1990s. After three years on the shop floor – and with no IT knowledge – she persuaded her employer to create a role for her, managing the chain’s emerging web presence. She helped build the company’s first e-commerce site by reading web development books borrowed from the shop.

There followed a period combining work with part-time study over five years, and culminating in a Computer Science degree, during which time she moved to Foremost IT where she worked as a software engineer and project manager for a further four years. There she gained invaluable experience of Oracle development and enjoyed working in a range of sectors, including healthcare and dairy farming.

In her spare time, Maria practises piano and Taekwon-do in equal measure. She has a black belt in one of these. You can find her music at willowbarkmusic.blogspot.com.

Ewan began his career implementing fast algorithms for constraint satisfaction at Strathclyde University. This opened doors at the technology startup Atlantech who were building a high-performance Element Management platform to help growing Telcos to build and administer the rapidly growing internet in the late 1990s. Atlantech was acquired by Cisco in 2000 allowing Ewan to move on to projects that exploited the rapidly growing internet, and to work on early prototypes of what we take for granted as today’s Web 2.0 interfaces.

In 2003 Ewan moved to the financial sector, first spending eight years with JP Morgan. Half of this was in an area creating the firm’s research publications: an Office-integrated .NET front-end allowed analysts to produce research data and publications. Ewan’s role was mostly in making this work alongside a Java-based backend for reviewing and publishing the research, disseminating it to email subscribers and collecting readership information.

Ewan’s final four years at JP Morgan were in the Firmwide Engineering & Architecture group, running a team that aimed to take the best open source software and make it usable, while also helping other software development teams to understand the correct way to select and deploy commercial products in the firm.

A move to Barclays in 2011 allowed Ewan to spend two years developing web services to present a unified layer of account information to high net worth clients. This gave him new experience in information transformation and data warehousing.

Ewan is also a keen cyclist. He cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats in 2012 in aid of Action Medical Research, a charity that helps fund research specifically into children’s diseases.