About Me

I live in South London, England and work mostly in and around London.

What I do

I build Web Sites, talk about Web Development and Design practices. I've worked in various different capacities, but mostly as Senior Web Developer

The majority of my time working in IT has been focused on front end web development. These days: ASP.Net (Web forms and MVC), Javascript (AJAX), XML, XSLT, CSS and obviously HTML are my everyday tools and most of the sites and applications I have worked on have been backed by a SQL server database or two and more recenlty in an SOA environment.

Although my experience is primarily Microsoft focused on the server side this does not mean that I'm not a keen practitioner of open source environments and software including different Javascript frameworks including jQuery and ExtJS.

How I like to work

When I'm freelancing I work on fixed price contracts and on daily rate contracts and have done for several years. I'm happy to consult or get my hands dirty and prefer to working in agile, creative environments.

I'd like to work with some of the leading talent in the UK to produce creative, well designed web sites and applications.

Blog

Currently My Blog resides on Wordpress and gets updated when I get the chance. You can find the following articles there currently ...

• Extreme Programming – a pocket guide.

  I've worked in a few different environments where they professed to using Extreme Programming. I've also professed to understanding what it is. I was curious to find if both cases were true, but I didn't want to read a 600 page book to find the answers.

• Dodgy recruitment companies and their devious ways…

  For the last 10 years or so I've been contracting and I've had to deal with recruitment agencies a lot. A lot. Over the last three to four years I've noticed a some worrying behaviour, from said companies, as the internet becomes the obvious place for recruiters to match candidates to jobs. Now, before I continue this rant article proper, I know that recruitment is business to these guys and it can be competitive and cut throat. I also want to say I have worked with some really intelligent, good, honest recruiters and have refrained from listing some of them here. In fact, on the whole I'd say 70% of the people I speak to fall into this group. It would be boring to read about these guys, so I want to talk about the other 30%.

• My Twitter Flickr Mashup

  I attended full frontal last week, which was excellent. It gave me inspiration to experiment a bit with some Javascript. I went about setting myself a very loose brief; I wanted to do something quick, in no more than seven hours, I didn't want to have to write any server side code and wanted the code to reside on a single page. I went about looking into the Twitter and Flickr APIs and decided to combine them by doing a photo search on flickr using tweets from the Twitter public timeline every 60 seconds. What I came up with ended up as a kind of visual social commentary using Twitter and flickr.

• To support Lotus F1 Racing or not?

  My first memory of Lotus of any kind has to be the 1986 JPS team. I’d certainly watched races previously, my Dad is a fan of Lotus so I couldn’t avoid it, thankfully. This is where, as for most kids, a fanatical interest in any sport or team comes from. I remember the season specifically because [...]

• windows 7, Firefox and slow google reader and google mail

  I recently upgraded to windows 7 64bit (RTM) from Vista 64bit. It all went suprisingly well and after only a couple of weeks I’ve not had any issues to speak of except an annoying browser issue which I only really nocticed when using Google Reader and Google Mail. When tryign ot user Google Reader, I notices [...]

• The government has selected Martha Lane Fox as its ‘digital champion’ …

  Just a quick one! The government has selected Martha Lane Fox as its ‘digital champion’ according to the bbc website. I only know a little about Ms Lane Fox, mostly from the original legend of lastminute.com, but from what I’ve read it’s difficult to disagree with her intent (and the govenrment’s). [...]

• Upgrading to Windows 7 Ultimate

  I've just installed windows 7 Ultimate, upgrading from Windows Vista Ultimate ... This is a rough timeline of my installation ...

• Javascript League Tables

  Having seen a lot of league tables on various websites I was suprised to not see the implementations use the UI more effectively. Most of the implementations required the user to click on seperate links to view the current table, results or fixtures. I was interested to see if I could provide an easier way of [...]

• Private, priviledged and public class members in Javascript

  I've just started reading proffesional Javascript Design Patterns. Whilst I understand the principles and the concepts, changing the way I write Javascript is proving to be a little more difficult. I've been writing Javascript for a long while and getting out of bad habits is tricky! One of the first things I kept forgetting, was how to declare private / public and priviledged members. So I wrote this quick 'reminder stub' to help me remember.

• jquery-1.2.6-vsdoc.js and focus()

  I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes trying to resolve a problem where jQuery wouldn’t focus on a form element when trying: $('#formElementId').focus(); I reverted to doing: document.getElementById('formElementId').focus(); to see if there was something else causing the problem in my code and it worked straight away. I didnt have any other javascript in my code so I was a little [...]