About

My name is Tom Gleeson, I’m the Gobán Saor (pronounced Gobawn Sayer) a master datasmith. Living in Eadestown, in rural Co. Kildare, Ireland with my wife Caimín, two kids, a Jack Russell terrier,a cat and a rabbit four chickens.

I’m a Data Processing and BI professional with a special interest in the “last mile” of data and process delivery. I’m a creator of Time Assets; software artefacts that enable my clients to package time for reuse when there’s not enough time in the day.

My IT passion is data, particularly in its raw, untamed and often unloved state that many businesses are forced to use day-in day-out i.e. the un-conformed, un-cleansed, un-safe extracts from operational systems. If there’s any value to be extracted from such data then I’ll find it.

I also love data when it’s on the move, I’ve been building data interfaces for 3 decades, but the thrill of extending systems by getting them to talk to other systems still remains.

Although most of my data work is now within the realms of Excel models, BI and general data crunching, the sight of an OLTP database schema still stirs the blood. Looking at nothing more than a system’s database you can tell everything the system was and everything the system is going to be (apologies to outhouse assassination scene in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven where William Munny, tells the shaken kid wanting to be his protege “it’s a hell of a thing to kill a man. You take away everything he has and everything he would have.” ).

Data is the DNA of any business, systems come and go, data lives on forever.

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Gobán Saor?

The (or more correctly An) Gobán Saor was a stone mason (or sometimes a black smith) who according to Irish mythology by virtue of his craft (building castles, moving mountains, that sort of thing) was able to live a free life moving from commission to commission and from royal court to royal court. My father who came from a long line of stone masons and master builders, told me many of these stories and also used to take me to a magical island in our local bogland that he called the Gobán Saor’s island. (Now better known as the discovery place of the Derrynaflan Chalice ). Continuing in the tradition of freelance craftsman (data mason rather than stone mason) I’ve used gobansaor as my nom de plume in forums, online apps etc. over the years, partially to keep a tradition alive but to be honest usually because I’m sure nobody else will have taken the name already

Contact Tom.