STEFAN FIELDING-ISAACS

Welcome to my personal Web site.

I suppose something about me would be in order, given that this site bears my name. I was born in Scotland where my parents went to the University of St. Andrews. I was educated in England until I was about six (they start much earlier than the States so this meant a couple of years of school) and then in Canada. Where I learned to ice skate (not terribly well) and shoot (very well) and where I joined the Boy Scouts. I gained a love of the outdoors in Canada and became a Canadian citizen. My father worked as a managing engineer on a number of oil-related projects in the Canadian Artic and we moved with him to Alaska when he worked on the Trans-Alaskan oil pipeline (one of the world's great engineering feats) in the early 1970s.

I continued with the Boy Scouts, learning arctic survival skills and adding cross-country skiing to my downhill skiing skills. Vacations with my parents took me back to Jamaica, where I had lived for a little while and where my sister was born. My father's side of the family has been in Jamaica for hundreds of years, and my mother's side is in Poland for even longer. She was born in Poland and survived both the Nazi occupation and the early years of the Russian occupation to escape to Ireland. They met and married at university in Scotland.

I went to high school for a couple of years in Alaska, and then we moved down to Bellevue, Washington when most of the work on the pipeline was complete. Finishing high school in Bellevue, I earned entrance to a couple of technical schools (Rice, CalTech) and a little liberal arts school called Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After visiting Reed, I fell in love with the life of the mind evidenced there and it was really no choice as to where I would go to university.

After my first two years I took a leave of absence and went to work for a small startup. I was trying to decide which direction to go with my academic career and when I returned to Reed after a gap of three semesters, I changed majors from physics to history. I graduated from Reed with a degree in history.

Eventually I moved south to California for the dual reasons of work choice and sunlight and spent most of the last fifteen years in Silicon Valley for firms like Sun, Silicon Graphics, and Apple.

I've worked both full-time and as a freelancer and see much to recommend both. I founded and ran my own firm from 1993 to 2000 and then spent a stint consulting in the Valley. After taking a sabbatical year living in France I came back and took to Seattle and spent a year consulting at Microsoft. I liked France and Europe so much that I'm planning on buying a place in Paris eventually.

Along the way, I've spent time skydiving, roadracing grand prix motorcycles, rockclimbing, and scuba diving (which I still love to do). My latest passion is golf, and trying to break 90. Next on my horizon is learning how to sail and how to fly.

I'm now a Solutions Delivery Manager at Microsoft, managing a very large scale infrastructure project.