About
After I left school, and after working at a couple of temporary jobs, I went more-or-less straight into software development and support. I worked for a broadcast software company, a publishing company and then, most recently, an events management company. In 2007 I started to really dislike office life, so I made a big change and started working for myself, making one off pieces of furniture, wooden signs and still dabbling in IT support for small businesses and home users. I have discovered that working for myself is my preference, and it’s nothing to do with software vs. other industries – “there’s politics everywhere” as my mate Ben says, so I’ve given up the furniture making and hope to shift my income back towards the IT side of things in the near future.
In particular, I’m interested in getting back into programming; specifically web app development again and web design afresh. Previously I made ugly intranet-style apps using Microsoft technologies, but I have been reading up on all the latest techniques in these recent years, and like to think my knowledge is roughly up to date, even if I’m not there in practise yet. I have a reasonable understanding of CSS, semantic HTML, and I hope at least a basic grasp of good design.
At the moment I can’t think of better a project to help out than inkscape, which has helped me out enormously with my sign making work. I have so far just made a couple of extremely simple python extensions which I have blogged about, hopefully they serve a need and will come in useful for other people.
Other stuff which I plan to write about soon: I recently wrote a small MVC framework in PHP, which I plan to use for my wife’s web shop. I’m also trying to learn a lisp dialect called clojure which does not seem to come easy to me due to its functional nature. Seemingly I’m a little too used to imperative and OO styles of programming, as learning to think “functionally” is quite tough. I’m sure there will be other non-software-related random thoughts on here too.