Creative technologist
Owen Barnes — 04 / 06
Owen Barnes has spent thirty years building for the web and spotting technical shifts early.
01
The internet first felt like magic to Owen in the 1990s, through AOL CDs, IRC and a modem that blocked the household phone line. He has been chasing that feeling ever since.
He built early in Ruby on Rails and Node.js, then created SocketStream, the first real-time Node.js framework. It was presented at QCon San Francisco in 2012 and its research and development was sponsored by AOL.
02
As a technology adviser to McKinsey and Capco, Owen advised bank CTOs and senior leaders and briefed clients on Bitcoin before it became mainstream. He later contributed to the Status.im whitepaper and Polkadot litepaper.
Today he works at the frontier of AI, building Livealy in the mornings and helping people and organisations act on the same change in the afternoons.
03
SocketStream made pages respond in real time. His writing made emerging systems legible. Livealy composes the page around whoever arrives. The continuing subject is agency inside a world that can respond to the observer.
Read Owen's perspective.