About me

My strategy for work life balance is to just blur the edges.   Let me share my obsessions with bookbinding, writing and software engineering.

And something about the images.  The first one is a collection of paper casts I made.  I’m not sure if they are protecting or terrorizing my beloved carved monkey.  The diorama is a dingy archivist’s office that I made for an Indigo festival a few years ago.  If their employer was willing to spring for new light bulbs you could see that it really is all indigo.  And the stone doughnut I made resting in the sunshine in a dry arroyo in the Snow Canyon State Park just outside of St. George in Utah.  My memory is that I only used other rocks as tools, but maybe I had a pen knife with me too.  Memory is a funny thing.

One of the first manifestations of my love of the American southwest  was an art gallery I co-owned a while back.

 

Bookbinding

I’ve been an active student of bookbinding for about 20 years now.   One of the great things about it to me is that I came with no natural ability.  I’m not bad at it now, but that is all through effort.  You’ll find a few images below, but probably the best way to explore my bookbinding work is via my Instragram feed, as really that is the only part of my life I seem to document in pictures.

I’ve created a couple of Instructables for   one of those composition notebooks  and   a quick miniature book.  And for awhile I was hosting Toronto’s participation in the International Edible Book Festival.

Bookbinding is the general focus of my art these days, so this seems like the right place to link to my artist resume.

Software Engineering

My first few jobs were in real time process control.  I worked with traffic control systems, automated laundry services and command and control of power generating stations.

I then worked in user interface design.  We created a prototyping environment eventually marketed as Intermaphics that strongly influenced the design of air traffic control systems for about 15 years.

I spent a while in technical sales supporting object oriented databases.

In 2001 I re-entered the world of software product development.   I architected an Oracle high availability solution as well as a heterogeneous log-based data replication tool.  Most recently I’ve become focused on data science and am an architect with IBM’s Watson Studio.

I amuse myself creating a few android apps as well.

Here’s a more conventional resume.

Contact

james.spyker@gmail.com

2905-95 Thorncliffe Park Drive, Toronto, ON  Canada M4H 1L7

416 577 7727