Welcome to my blog. I’m a polygot software engineer based in the UK working at Eckoh in research and development dept.
I’ve been interested in computers since primary school, when I used to copy BBC BASIC games from books (Towers of Hanoi FTW!). I studied computing at A level & computer science in university. I’m always tinkering with code, and when I’m not writing it, I’m probably reading about it.
I started programming in BASIC at school, quickly moving to Visual Basic, then Delphi and finally Java in university. Apparently, this makes me “mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration” according to Edsger Dijkstra.
I first ventured on to the internet in 1997, and I soon began to build my own (static) web sites. I wrote Q3Tweak as a teenager in 1998 in Delphi, it was a configuration tool for maximising frame rate (or graphics quality) in the then popular game: Quake III Arena.
Starting out in my first job as a web designer, I progressed from HTML/CSS and JavaScript to PHP in 2001. I quickly made the transition from being a web designer to a developer. Designing sites was fun but completely subjective, boiling down to personal preference, mostly the client’s.
Now-a-days I jump between a handful of technologies from PHP to CoffeeScript, Clojure or VoiceXML. I also jump between the three main operating systems, using Windows and Linux at work, and Mac and Linux at home (Arch Linux at present but am seriously contemplating a switch to Linux Mint).
When I’m not using a computer I like to head outdoors with my camera, though I’m a casual holiday photographer of late (boo!), check out my Flickr stream.
“the more I learn, the less I know”
Um … what?!
As your knowledge of a domain increases, most likely so does your appreciation for the breadth of the domain. Your acquired knowledge feels diluted as a result. This is loosely analogous to the Dunning-Kruger effect.