I am a programmer and web developer. I have over two decades of experience in programming in a wide variety of languages including C++, Visual Basic/Gambas, Python, Perl, PHP and JavaScript and am fully conversant with the latest web standards (HTML5 and CSS3).
I began programming at an early age on the Acorn Electron, first learning BASIC and then moving on to 6502 Assembly.
I did spent a few years getting to grips with Microsoft development first using Visual Basic and then moving on to Visual C++, but my work only really started to flourish when I was introduced to Linux-based operating systems and other UNIX-like systems which offered a far more powerful and intuitive way for me to work.
Today I specialise in providing professional computing solutions using Open Source software, maximising reliability and efficiency while minimising costs. I take a great pride in my work as it is something I do not only to earn money but also for the sheer enjoyment of a problem well solved and a job well done.
Most if not all of my professional work has been on behalf of others; I strongly support ethical business practices and as a part of this I do not tend to visibly add my name to work I have done as a means of advertising. This, combined with the fact that a lot of my work has been internal and essential to businesses, has left me with a lack of demonstrable examples of my work.
After leaving a long term permanent job and starting my own business, I decided to start this web site in order to provide examples of my work, ideas and abilities. As time goes on I will be adding more and more to this site and I encourage you to take a look around and see what I've done so far.
I'm primarily a programmer and am not a graphic designer. I wanted this site to be all my own work insofar as that is possible, so I have not used any of the graphic designers in my network as I normally would for a client's site; I have used Bootstrap for convenience, and most of my web work uses jQuery.
Here, and in no particular order, are various little mini-projects I've worked on for your perousal. My hope is that by providing many smaller projects over time, you will get a better feel for my capabilities than if I were to point you to a project I had worked on as a part of a team.
These projects are bits and bobs I've written to aid development, evaluation code I've written when playing with new libraries and toolkits, things I've done for family & friends and so forth.
Mel wanted ideas of things to paint beginning with various letters of the alphabet, so I threw together this site of suggestions for her. All images were taken from a simple google image search.
jQuery Plugin to allow the easy addition of "copy to clipboard" buttons to web pages and web applications. I've provided all the information you need to use it yourself, along with examples for various use-cases.
I wrote a simple falling block game for my mother when I was 13, and I decided to port it to a web-based application to evaluate the PixiJS framework as a base for online games.
I was playing with the idea of using an animated SVG; unfortunately SVG support is still too sketchy in many browsers for this to be useable, but I listed it here anyway as a proof of concept.