Ian Barton
Owner at Manor Farm
Shrewsbury, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIan Barton is a versatile owner and operator of Manor Farm in Shrewsbury with a distinctive career that spans medical research, information technology, and agriculture. Trained to PhD level in microbiology, biochemistry and virology at the University of Sheffield, he spent the late 1970s and 1980s developing and testing antiviral drugs for herpes simplex before migrating into IT as a network administrator and software developer. Since 1996 he has managed farms, land and property development, combining scientific rigour with practical land stewardship and rural business management. Ian also applies software skills to niche open-source projects—contributing Python back-end code to Memacs to ingest and convert social and backup data into Org-mode—highlighting an aptitude for data integration and tooling. His trajectory shows a rare blend of laboratory science, hands-on technical problem solving, and long-term entrepreneurial resilience. Based in the UK, he aims to keep forging an independent path outside conventional employment while turning diverse expertise into sustainable ventures.
17 years of coding experience
BSc, Phd, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Virology, BSc, Phd, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Virology at The University of SheffieldSandbach School
Github Skills (9)
python10
data-integration10
xml-parsing10
org-mode10
filesystem8
e-mail4
send-email4
emacs4
sendmail4
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
novoid/Memacs
Sep 2013 - Sep 2013
What did I do on February 14th 2007? Visualize your (digital) life in Org-mode
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:51 commits in 11 days
Contributions summary:Ian primarily contributed to the `memacs` project by developing components to parse and process data from external sources, specifically Twitter and SuperBackup exports (SMS and phone calls). Their work involved writing Python code to interact with APIs (Twython for Twitter) and parsing XML data. The user implemented features to extract, format, and integrate this data into Org-mode files. They demonstrated an understanding of data ingestion, processing, and integration into a specific organizational format.
personal-information-managementpythondidquantified-selfvisualize
geekinthesticks/TMobileSMS
Oct 2009 - May 2011
Contributions:41 commits in 1 year 8 months
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