John Graham-Cumming
British software engineer and writer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Graham-Cumming is a British software engineer and writer[5] best known for starting a successful petition to the Government of the United Kingdom asking for an apology for its persecution of Alan Turing.[6] UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued the apology in September 2009.[7]As of 2025[update], Graham-Cumming is a member of the Board of Directors at Cloudflare,[8][9] where he previously served as the company's Chief Technology Officer until March 2025.[10][11][12] Prior to joining Cloudflare, he co-founded Electric Cloud.[4]
Cloudflare (Former CTO)[3]
Electric Cloud[4]
John Graham-Cumming | |
|---|---|
 John Graham-Cumming in 2010 | |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford (DPhil) |
| Known for | POPFile The Geek Atlas[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Cloudflare (Board of Directors)[2] Cloudflare (Former CTO)[3] Electric Cloud[4] |
| Thesis | The formal development of secure systems (1992) |
| Jeff W. Sanders | |
| Website | www |
Education
Graham-Cumming was educated at the University of Oxford obtaining a BA in Mathematics and Computation and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Science in 1992 for research on formal methods for secure computing systems supervised by Jeff W. Sanders.[13] He was an undergraduate and graduate student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.[13]
Career
Graham-Cumming is the original writer of POPFile, an open-source, cross-platform, machine learning email spam filtering program.[14] He is the author of The Geek Atlas, a travel book,[1] and The GNU Make book, a how-to technical manual for the GNU make software.[15] He also wrote and maintained a library of functions for GNU Make called the GNU Make Standard Library.[16]
In October 2010, he started an organization whose aim is to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine,[17][18][19][20] known as Plan 28.[21] He has also campaigned for open-source software in science.[22] In 2014, he launched the MovieCode site on Tumblr, which aims to connect film screenshots to specific extracts of source code.[23] Some of the films and source code covered on the MovieCode website are explored in depth in the form of videos on his site Behind The Screens.