About

Michael Halls-Moore is a rocket scientist by training and an entrepreneur by accident. He brings a scientific view towards all of the businesses he has been involved in, which number five at the time of writing. An extremely competent front and back end web developer, he has built websites which have had a cumulative total of more than 10 million visitors throughout their respective lifetimes.

After a first class honours Masters in Mathematics from University of Warwick, he jumped headlong into rocket science research at the world reknowned Hypersonics Group based in the Aeronautics department at Imperial College London. Not content with the "relaxed" lifestyle afforded to PhD students, he created and took part in four seperate web ventures and still managed to successfully write his thesis.

"Michael Halls-Moore is a man on a mission."
- Matt Brown, Editor, The Londonist

Stumbling upon the Imperial Entrepreneurs he managed to befriend a group of highly talented serial founders. After an extremely fun stint as a front end developer for Playfire, he co-founded and became Chief Technical Officer of social humour site PopJam with Alex Tew, the creator of the Million Dollar Homepage.

In his 28 years, Mike has so far managed to:

  • Gain 10 million viewers to one of his websites (Sock And Awe) in the space of a week, which was constructed in one day and sold on eBay four days later
  • Raise over $250,000 in angel finance
  • Run four web projects at the same time as completing his full-time PhD
  • Qualify as a Scuba BSAC Sports Diver
  • Rock-climb, Ice-Climb and Mountaineer in the UK, France, Italy and Tanzania, while chairing his University Outdoor Club.

On top of that, Mike is also skilled in the following technical areas:

  • Mathematics & Physics: Partial Differential Equations (PDE), Compressible Fluid Dynamics and Cosmology.
  • Scientific Computing: Solving Partial Differential Equations (PDE) computationally, primarily for the purposes of hypersonic Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in C++.
  • Web and Software Development: Full front and back end web development, including, but not limited to expertise with ASP.NET MVC, C++, HTML/CSS, Django, Linux, MySQL, Photoshop, Python and SQL Server.

Mike Away From The Computer

Mike very much enjoys climbing anything made of rock, ice or snow and frequently scares himself while doing so. His favourite routes include Direct Route, Milestone Buttress, Ogwen Valley, Wales, Fissure D'Ailefroide, Valouise, France and The Runnel, Cairngorms, Scotland.

His hobbies include attempting to learn theoretical physics (currently General Relativity), and adventure racing. He competes annually in the Men's Health Survival of the Fittest and Grim Challenge races and has been roped into the infamous Tough Guy by his friends.

Mike On The Web

Mike is currently working as a systems developer at Oxalyst Systems LLP.

The Site

The site has been designed, skinned and programmed entirely by me. However, I have been standing on the shoulders of many giants. The site was designed in Photoshop and coded up in GNU Emacs. It has been programmed in Python using the Django web framework, incorporating a MySQL database. It sits on a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server powered by Slicehost, using Apache and nginx as web servers.