Welcome to my personal website. I am a web application developer based in Devizes in the U.K. and I currently work for a large healthcare wholesaler where I'm responsible for their online store and integration the online system to internal bespoke systems.
Upon leaving school in 1996, I began work as an Apprentice Mechatronic Engineer at Westinghouse Brakes and finished my apprenticship as a Quality Assurance Systems Engineer, where I was responsible for creating the companies Paperless Quality System using FrontPage Express. I soon moved into the I.T. department and in time became the companies Domain Administrator and responsible for the company intranet, also completing a HND in Business and Information Technology.
I spent much of my spare time investigating the rapidly changing internet and taught myself a number of different programming languages, including ASP, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, MooTools, amongst others. I also begun a course with the Open University to provide me with more formal training. During this time, I realised that I was going to naturally reach a point where if I wished to learn more, I needed to actually do Web Development as a full time job and in 2006 I left my role to start a new job as a Web Developer.
Since then I have worked on a number of projects and have created a custom CMS system that the 20+ websites all use as a core which also include a number of installable packages that provide extra functionality such as eCommerce, Newsletters and a Gallery package. I have created a number of in-house systems that provide a complete booking system for the sales team and a flat plan tool for mangazine development. These two systems work together providing a complete workflow for the company and the flat plan tool also doubles up to allow external customers to view, manage and control all third party work that the company undertakes.
In 2014 I moved to my current employer where I am responsible for a large eCommerce store and ensuring that this is available 24 hours a day. This has included a complete redesign and a number of new functions.
I do believe that one key skill of any person who works with web technologies, is to ensure that your skill set is current and you keep up with the very rapidly changing times. HTML5 is now the mainstaple of websites and new technologies are being constantly added and expanded from NodeJS to AWS.