Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker, and journalist. He is the CTO of Negroni Venture Studios. He recently served as the interim CTO the for health technology startup Evaro, and before joining Negroni Venture Studios used to work for Raspberry Pi, and was the person responsible for writing things down.

He is the author of eight books, over a hundred academic papers, and has authored several standards dealing with real-time events and application interoperability.

You can often find him at conferences talking about interesting things, or deploying sensors to measure them. Sometimes he also stands in front of cameras.

He's known for benchmarking the new generation of Tiny ML accelerator hardware and, somewhat inexplicably, hacking hotel radios.

He's currently building Vera, a programming language designed for machines to write rather than humans. It throws out variable names entirely, requires contracts on every function, and compiles to WebAssembly. The idea is that if LLMs are going to write most of the code, the language should be designed around what they're good at and what they're bad at, rather than pretending they're people.

Some years ago now he rolled out a mesh network of five hundred sensor motes covering the entire of Moscone West during Google I/O.

A couple of years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. One of the first big scandals around mobile data it later became known as “locationgate” and caused several class action lawsuits, along with a U.S. Senate hearing. It even got a mention on South Park. Some years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

In the past he has written for Make: Magazine, Motherboard and VICE, Hackaday, Hackster.io, Raspberry Pi, and the O'Reilly Radar.

Alasdair is a recovering astrophysicist, and as part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.