A little about me
Hi, I'm an enthusiastic technophile and technical director of getpepper™ web design and software company. After a career of some 15 years in software development it was great to trade employee status for control over the fruits of my passion for software!
At 14 years old I got my first computer, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of the first widely available home computers in the UK. Aside from playing games of Manic Miner with my mates, I got a taste for programming - my first program was a Pontoon card game that allowed a player to take on the computer!
But it was as a maths undergraduate, at the University of Nottingham, that I got serious about computing. My tutor back then encouraged me to choose computer science over philosophy as a first year subsidiary subject and after that first year I completely switched to computer science - thanks, Dr. Armour! I finished my BSc (Honours) in computer science and for a while continued part-time work on a PhD, also in an area of computer science - thanks, Prof. Burke!
In the early '90s I began working as a software developer, first with a small engineering start-up and then with larger companies developing various types of business system. I was using C++ and object oriented techniques for development, and used Rumbaugh's notation and then UML in order to express software design.
Around '99 I got into Java development - my first web application used applets on the client and interfaced with the server using RMI. In addition to my Java experience, I've developed expertise in Spring Framework, Hibernate, JSP, PHP, various PHP frameworks and platforms, and along with Linux, these comprise my toolkit for web application development. I still occasionally make use of other languages, such as C++ (my first love) and Python, when there's a need.
I've since become involved in several areas of internet technology and have contributed, as an author, to the IETF - the organisation that sets many internet standards such as HTTP. This concerned an Internet Draft specification extending SIP, an internet telecommunications protocol, and the associated development of a SIP software stack in C.
My employee days culminated in the grand title of Software Engineering Design Authority being bestowed upon me! I never did perfect my Eric Cartman impression before moving on to start my own company, getpepper™.
Okay, it isn't all computing, I also play lots of tennis! I'm a regular league player at the Nottingham Tennis Centre, and get plenty of friendlies in too - if you're not interested in the techie stuff, maybe you fancy a game?
