About

I am a soft­ware devel­oper and tech­ni­cal archi­tect, based in Colch­ester, Essex, UK. I pro­gram mainly in Java, but also in PHP and other script­ing lan­guages. Addi­tion­ally, I have exten­sive exper­tise in acces­si­ble and standards-compliant client-side devel­op­ment using (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

You can read my full CV here.

Expe­ri­ence & Per­sonal History

I have worked in web devel­op­ment on and off since 1996, which is eas­ily long enough to have learned that indi­vid­ual tech­nolo­gies mat­ter far less than the abil­ity of a clear-thinking devel­oper to uti­lize them appro­pri­ately to meet spe­cific require­ments in an effi­cient manner.

I started out as a “web mas­ter” in the days when such things still existed. Since then, I have also found time to com­plete Mas­ters and PhD degrees in Phi­los­o­phy and Art His­tory, whilst doing occa­sional free­lance and short-term con­tracts, before return­ing to full-time devel­op­ment work at the begin­ning of 2005, join­ing Nature Pub­lish­ing Group.

My very first sites (which are no longer online, thank­fully!) were cum­ber­some efforts in HTML, JavaScript, and Perl CGI. Around the turn of the cen­tury, I thought I had seen the light and began pro­gram­ming in PHP, cre­at­ing swathes of code that, whilst being far more ver­sa­tile and fun, retained the over­all appear­ance of spaghetti Bolog­naise. As time went on, I became increas­ingly inter­ested in such arcane pro­gram­ming lore as object ori­en­ta­tion, design pat­terns, and frame­works; which lead ulti­mately to my learn­ing Java.

Around 2008, I gained a renewed inter­est in script­ing lan­guages, such as Ruby, agile devel­op­ment method­olo­gies, POJO’s, and light­weight appli­ca­tion frame­works which cut the “fluff” and allow devel­op­ers more space and time to focus on project goals.

Over the years, I have been for­tu­nate to work on a num­ber of extremely inter­est­ing projects, includ­ing the devel­op­ment of Nature Jobs, the Nature Reviews jour­nals, and the flag­ship nature.com home­page, as well as on the edi­to­r­ial and pub­lish­ing work­flow tools behind the scenes at Bio­med­Cen­tral.

Cur­rent Availability

I am cur­rently work­ing free­lance, so please feel free to con­tact me with details of your project.