Smylers contributes to the W3C and WhatWG groups that are developing HTML 5. He works for WebFusion, the web hosting and domain name provider formerly known as Pipex Hosting, where he started as a developer, mainly working on their Ubuntu dedicated servers products.

This year he persuaded them to let him relocate back Up North and to invent a position for him, so he is now their Hosting Analyst ‒ a job title so vague he pretty much gets to make it up as he goes along. Recently he’s been cajouled into a stint acting as the head of their Leeds operations, so has been bluffing his way in senior management. Previously Smylers was a trainer for GBdirect, where he taught PHP, Linux, CSS, Apache, and Perl to organizations including Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sony, Oxfam, and the Nationwide building society, and was the lead developer for top UK IT news website ‘The Register’.

He lives in a very nice apartment in the centre of Leeds ‒ so nice, in fact, that the council have issued a compulsory purchase order to knock it down.