Who We Are

The founders of Singing Horse Studio originally came together at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, where they were responsible for highly scalable, fault tolerant software development.

The team successfully architected, built and delivered the payments and billing engine infrastructure that now handles all the international currency transactions and currency exchange in Second Life.

They worked so well together, it made perfect sense to share this scalability knowledge with a wider audience, and so formed Singing Horse Studio in late 2010 with the aim to increase the quality of scalable services software development, particularly in the mobile, e-commerce, and payments space.

The Founders

Howard Sandford, CTO Software Engineering

Howard has enjoyed working with computer hardware and software since he built and programmed a Nascom 1 at the age of 13; a combination of skills that has lasted throughout his career.

With a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Sussex University he went on to run two successful companies, design a marine insurance engine that handled US$100m turnover, worked closely with Google Adwords APIs for 200,000 keyword PPC campaign management, designed flight and hotel booking web-sites for Microsoft TechEd, MSDN, and MobDev conferences, delivered timely sports results for Virgin Media’s portal web-site, and most recently lead the development team that successfully built an International Billing system for Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. During that time Howard somehow managed to cram in four years as a professional hypnotist, so watch those eyes guys, watch those eyes.

Incidentally, Howard’s mild OCD works in his favour when it comes to writing software — managing to produce clean, readable code that inspires a simple elegance. It’s the kind of inspiration that allows him to bring out the best in any engineering team he leads.

Either that, or it’s the hypnosis.

Simon Rowland, Senior Software Engineer and CFO

Simon has over ten years professional experience of working with large scale Software, and an MSc with distinction in Software Engineering from The University of Oxford.

From megacorp to startup, waterfall to agile, from C, C++, Java and Perl to Python and php, from mobile phone to mainframe, virtual machine to virtual world, from Web Services to web services, and from small application to huge scale server farms, Simon has worked on a tonne of fascinating and different stuff and learnt a thing or two from almost all of it!

Simon worked for IBM for eight years, as part of the team delivering the Java Virtual Machines that underpin most of IBM’s technology, and for Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, delivering huge scale web applications and front end integration of their new international billing system.

Simon is a keen rock climber and cyclist, and is currently enjoying exploring the South Downs on his mountain bike.

John Marshall, Head of Special Projects

Johnny was bitten by a radioactive spider when he was young. Sadly, the expected super powers didn’t develop. Johnny’s thoughts of a life fighting crime turned towards a more pedestrian path – total world domination through the medium of computing.

Luckily teen angst melted away leaving behind only the love of computers. That love has spanned and grown over the past quarter of a century, taking Johnny from 10 PRINT “JOHN IS COOL” all the way to Pid ! {ossm, “SO OSSM!”}. Johnny studied Artificial Intelligence at University, and learned an impossibly large amount about computing that wasn’t strictly related to his studies.

During Johnny’s time at University several important things happened, the World Wide Web was born, home internet access took off, and Linux was released to the world. Johnny waded joyfully in that early primordial techie soup. Since then Johnny has spent a lot of time building useful backend systems for networked applications, from financial systems to MMO infrastructure, from basic websites to full CMSs, from stand alone apps to clustered and fault tolerant ones.

Johnny still holds out hope that the super powers are late blossomers.