My Heritage
I was born in Sheffield — City of Steel — just in time to watch two worlds end.
On my father's side: the name Teixeira carries a history of Portuguese seafaring. The family traces to the navigators who discovered the island of Madeira — people who moved toward the horizon because the unknown was there to be understood. That instinct has not left the bloodline.
On my mother's side: my grandfather was a master cutler — a little mester, in Sheffield's trade language — a highly skilled craftsman and grinder who made high-quality stainless steel knives as part of the industrial tradition that once made the city the edged-tools capital of the world. By the time I came along, mass production had already begun to swallow that world whole. The craft survived in him. The industry did not survive around him.
From both sides I inherited the same conviction: that precision, patience, and the willingness to go further than anyone expects are what separate work that lasts from work that doesn't. Whether the medium is steel, film, code, or story — the care you bring to structure is what endures.
My Family
I'm the oldest of three sons, born to Pamela and José Gomes in the year humans first walked on the moon. My parents had escaped two disasters in one stroke — the Sheffield industrial collapse and a political revolution in Portugal — and set about proving that passion and precision can beat almost any odds. In a pre-Naked-Chef world, they opened an à la carte restaurant on the River Trent — The New Ferry Restaurant, at the site of a Roman crossing outside a medieval market town — and achieved international acclaim in one of England's harder economic stretches.
I learned early that the things worth building take time, and that they are built through structure, not luck. I've carried that forward into everything I make.
My Journey
By the time I graduated from the University of Brighton with a degree in Computer Science, the UK had slumped into another recession. I joined the exodus — not out of desperation, but out of curiosity. I wanted to understand the view from somewhere else.
That question took me further than I expected. I spent years working at global scale in enterprise technology: American Express in Brighton, Ford Credit, and Telstra — where I helped architect one of the world's first fully digital mobile networks, with a year on secondment to Pacific Bell in San Francisco along the way, an early, unplanned glimpse of the city I'd later call home. Then curiosity pulled me toward the early internet, where I worked on the team building a pre-Google natural-language search platform whose technology became 192.com, one of the web's first large-scale public search engines.
Then came a different kind of move. I came to San Francisco and shifted inward — from global-scale systems to local-scale mission. I spent nearly a decade building digital infrastructure for nonprofits and NGOs: the San Francisco Art Institute, the Bay Area Video Coalition, California Newsreel, Film Arts Foundation. Real brick-and-mortar work. Bridging the digital divide. Innovating public media. Building things meant to outlast the moment.
The film work ran alongside and through all of it — fifteen years as Director of Photography with Coffee & Language Productions, a long-running client relationship with K.C. Smith Films, two years capturing games at Electronic Arts.
Today I'm based in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I collaborate with filmmakers, photographers, founders, and creative organizations on work that spans traditional and cutting-edge media. I also lead The Far Edge, my fractional CTO and advisory practice.
This site is where you'll find the film and photography work. For the technology and advisory side, visit TheFarEdge.com.