Who I am

Working on the principle of "you are what you do", here who I am and who I have been, in reverse order.

I am an experienced and qualified web developer (see What I do for more detail on this).

In April 2008 my status is that I am a VAT registered sole trader, currently living in France with my wife. I have been commuting between the UK and France with no problems for six years - and am currently working on my CMS when not seeking my next big challenge.

I have worked almost uniquely for local government, on the web, making and developing local government websites for the past 10 years. One important contract I had for most of that period ended on 31st March 2008.

While I started off "just designing websites", I have become more and more interested in web-applications (websites that do things) and the slow but sure take-up of elements that will lead to the "semantic web". I am particularly interested in the UK government promoted use of controlled lists (initially for populating meta data).

I am a "techie" whose job it was to put these controlled lists to work but with a background of web usability and interface design I made some surprising discoveries.

I presented these discoveries, which shows how some of the data from controlled lists and meta data can spill out onto local government websites, making them more navigable and intuitive to use. In comparison to the semantic web, my findings and examples are trivial, but their importance lies in what they mean. That such things can be done for little or no effort.

I enjoy working with graphics and css and I can clone any graphic style from leaflets or just collaborate with and elaborate upon other people's ideas, but do not consider myself to be a graphic designer.

I have previously worked as a tester for a GIS (mapping software) company - I was in a team whose job it was to test the interface of a very large and complicated utilities programme. This is where I really learned profound lessons about what constitutes usability. Working in the .gov.uk domain area usability is something I have since learned a lot more about - along with accessibility.

From leaving school until 1989 I worked in two supermarket companies in the UK. I am proud to say I did all jobs - from part-time trolley-boy on a Thursday night, to General Store Manager of several large stores. Retail work at that time at least, was hard work involved long hours and could be very stressful. I met lots of people of varying backgrounds, skills and integrity levels, but I worked hard and achieved some notoriety and reward.

In the space between my retail and software careers I was variously self employed, unemployed, retraining and even worked for a while in Russia. I spent a long time trying different career paths, looking for something I was both passionate about and skilful enough to do.

My activities and interests include countryside life, occasionally practicing golf and photography.

In true open source fashion, I spend too much time daily on a PHP forum adding to the font of knowledge surrounding PHP and "helping" other users. I am interested by all things to do with the web, but especially PHP. I read planet-php.org and phpdeveloper.org twice daily. I attend PHP user group meetings when I can and occasional PHP Conferences.

I read quite a lot - but not as much as I should. My recent and current reading list is:

I have never really thought about this before and I don't have any tattoos, but if I did have a tattoo it would say "PHP Rocks!", which is a pretty sad indictment really.