About

I’m a software engineer living and working in Yorkshire, UK, wishing I lived in London.

I studied software engineering at university for 4 years, and knocked out applications in C++, Java, Visual Basic.

I spent the best part of 16 years writing software in PHP, before I gave it all up in October 2018, and went off to write everything in Go and TypeScript.

Why TypeScript? Peer pressure at work.

Why Go? Because it’s lovely. My first foray into Go, was watching JustForFunc videos, on my laptop, in the dark, in a hotel in the Lake District. I highly recommend watching all of those videos, Francesc is a fantastic teacher.

I love open source software, and I’ve contributed to many PHP tools such as PHPUnit, PHPDoc, PHP Code Sniffer along the way. I learnt Python so I could write a bunch of plugins for Sublime Text, before I stopped using it in favour of Code.

I like to think of myself as a high performing and experienced Technical Leader. I mean I’m getting older, so the experienced bit has to be correct, right? I’ve built many teams over the years, mainly distributed/remote and loved every minute of it. Currently, I’m an individual contributor working on a range of technologies and disciplines.

Most of my development jobs have focussed on automation and/or integrations. One of the highlights was leading on the creation of the John Lewis UK ISP platform. My team focussed on the CRM, provisioning (broadband and home phone), and account management website.

I weirdly love process, and data, and graphs, and monitoring, and a whole bunch of other stuff I’ll probably blog about.