Adventures with Stemount
When I was at college, my friend Brad introduced me to Ste via instant messaging. The two of them a ran a web hosting company called WyMox Hosting, and Ste was half of that. He was around 2 years younger than me, and at the age I met him, he already had technical skills, business savvy and confidence that I envied.
Around that time I was setting up a community called DFEY — Digital Freedom Education in Youth — a group focused on providing a peer group for young people in technology who embraced technology and Free Software.
Ste was an ideal fit, to a point.
He liked the community, he liked what we were doing, but he didn’t quite see eye to eye with ideals and Software Freedom.
My guess is that he’d today say that he agreed with it more than he didn’t, and that he just had a pragmatic perspective. Which is fair.
When DFEY went to our first “big” tech event in 2009 — Young Rewired State — Ste came along too…
Over the next few years, various opportunities and events came our way, and on one memorable occasion, we headed to Tomorrow’s Web Conference together.
This should have been his cup of tea, and errr, instead I’m pretty sure neither of us dug it greatly. My “great” habit of wielding a camera at all times produced these memorable clips.
I think it was Tomorrow’s Web, when I remember sharing a room in some godforsaken travel lodge near Euston with Ste, and being dragged out at 2am cos some muppet had set off the fire alarm.
More opportunities came our way, and we were invited to some very self-congratulatory 30under30 event. I’m not sure what it was about, why we were invited, or what the point was. I think we heard “London” and assumed it was good. But Ste won an award and was interviewed for this video.
At one point, Ste even joined me on stage for a “talk” about DFEY. Something that he must have found fairly challenging given his joy of his Mac, and my (at the time) middle-of-the-road fundamentalist approach to software freedom.
In this video, one of his future clear passions is clear: Drupal.
Whilst at the time Drupal was my blogging software, Ste embraced it — giving talks at Drupal User Group North West, and enthusiastically channelled himself at it.
At some event at Madlab (#GIWMCR) he gave this talk, which @cubicgarden recorded. I archived it off Ian’s blip.tv, and reuploaded it to YouTube.
His Entrepreneurial streak inspired me in my projects (and continues to) and one of his business presentations I still think is “seminal”.
We spent a fair amount of time chatting shit and bantering at each other at events. I’ve shared some of that, and I’ll share more.
One thing I’ve decided not to share is a semi-drunken radio-interview with him, I made in 2011.
It starts with him complaining it’s 3:30am, and includes me asking him why iPhones are good for business, a long rant about how microsoft or apple or someone isn’t innovative, and some memorable quotes about Windows CE. Ste actually sounds alright in it, but I sound like a drunk, stupid, antagonistic fool. Not inaccurate. Also not flattering.
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He had a memorable sense of humour, and when we were building things, I remember him making “school routr 2.0”. The problem, he explained, was that lots of school children were getting stabbed on their way to school. Therefore school routr 2.0, plotted all the crime hotspots (using open data) on a map, and routed the children around the stabbings to safety.
But perhaps one of his greatest successes, of the era I knew him, happened when I wasn’t there.
He’d been invited to a hackathon in London somewhere prestigious on Victoria Street like Microsoft HQ.
The competition was emergency services focused, with Tim Berners Lee, the founder of the WorldWideWeb, and a panel of non-technical judges deciding the winners.
Ste realised that nontechnical judges frequently rated hacks on their idea, and how good they looked and were presented, rather than their technical innovation.
So when it was Ste’s turn to pitch, he confidently stood up in from on Tim Berners Lee, and showed off his app — that showed Emergency Services Helicopers — what they were doing and why they were up there. The app had everything — loading screens, great visuals, animations.
The judges lapped it up. Ste sat down. There was just one thing — he hadn’t written a line of code. Everything he’d presented had been entirely mocked up in Keynote — the apple version of Powerpoint.
Whilst thankfully, I think major controversy was avoided by not winning, Ste was proud of this moment and thought it was very funny.
I have my own history of hackathon pranks from way back, but the balls and confidence to pull this one off…!
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In 2016, I started two events.
- #DigiClimbMCR
- #BookClubMCR
Ste rapidly became a key part of BookClubMCR — a bookclub about Business Books. I don’t remember well; it’s possible we started it together or maybe he even started it.
After several events, at a brief attempt at doing it virtually using early-era web conferencing, the event sort of fizzled out, and yet again Ste and me drifted apart on good terms.
I hoped we would reunite at some point in the future, and that another chapter would be written.
I would go on to put lots of energy into #DigiClimbMCR, which become The Climbing Clan.
Unfortunately, I found out on Aug 13th that he’d died, and discovered his funeral was being held on Aug 16th.
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I did think what the Ste Mount I knew would have thought about me sharing this post, and some of the videos in it. I think he’d have been bemused, amused, and then quickly complained that I hadn’t shared the right ones. He might well have enjoyed the nostalgia.
I don’t feel the videos portray either of us in particularly good lights, but these were the people we were, and we enjoyed many of the moment we shared.
I’m not wholly convinced he’d have wanted to be remembered by “him in the era I knew him best”, and yet that’s what I do, and I treasure those memories. He was a great character, a wonderful friend, and even though it’s been years since I spoke to him, I’ve cried tears of great sadness for the loss of friend, and great part of my life at that point.
He’d have been greatly amused though, by the software I’ve used to post this… and might even have complained that I should have used something open source… like Drupal! Ah how the tables turned!
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It’s now safe to turn off your computer Ste. Thanks ❤
