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Here you can read a little bit about me and how I got to where I am at the moment in my life.. The journey has been interesting and somehow I managed to end up with a nicely rounded set of code skills!

Sometimes things happen on purpose and sometimes they happen by accident, here's a summary of my programming journey through my life so far, and ultimately my quest for knowledge and to teach everyone I meet what I have learned.

Did my father notice geekdom running through my veins as I toddled around the living room? I don't know about that and I have never thought of myself as a geek! All I know is that I loved that Vic20, it came with a tape of four games "race", "hoppit", "type a tune" and "blitz". They were all great as far as I was concerned. I forget how young I was at the time, but I can't have been any more than 11 years old and it wasn't long before I started messing around with the program listings, changing the building graphics in Blitz, I even made a few simple programs using the basic language that was resident on the Vic20, not bad stuff for a 11 year old. I used this computer until the keyboard literally wore out!

Next I got a C64 for Christmas to replace my worn out Vic20, I loved the games but began basic programming in earnest and I soon realised that C64 basic was so utterly, utterly terrible that I might as well learn assembly language, which was only slightly harder than the basic! I had immense fun with the C64's sprites and I wrote a few games that are sadly lost to time now. Unfortunately my computer programming career was on very dangerous ground now. I was a very physically active child and I wanted to spend lots of time out doors. I still loved my programming but I was faced with a decision one summer holiday and ended selling my C64 to a friend who I didn't like much, but £60 was a lot of money to me back then.

I took that £60 and sank it all into a bike that was hard work to ride any further than 5 miles, had no brakes, uncomfortable seat, but all my friends had them. We all thought we were really cool, we all watched "BMX Bandits" that year, and yes I had my share of fun and skinned knees on that stunt bike, after a couple of weeks I just knew something was missing from my life. Luckily there was a shiney new Spectrum for me to play with under the Christmas tree and the BMX soon became forgotten as I lost myself in Z80 Assembly language! I wrote a huge, huge amount of programs on the Spectrum, ranging from programs that could digitally record music from audio tapes to space invaders games and crazy little animations! It wasn't a patch on the C64 but I liked the Z80 processor better, it was more fun to program.

The Commodore Amiga was the computer that really finally gave me the power to do some of the things I had imagined, I used several programming methods on this marvellous machine, including 68,000 Assembly language, and even some of the derivatives of Basic that were doing the rounds like Amos and Blitz. Lots and lots of fun was had and this is where I first became seriously interested in 3D graphics programming, I wrote my first vector routines for the Amiga, the internet was not available at that time so looking back, I take a lot of pride that I was able to work out a lot of the mathematics of 3D rotation from the sketchy lessons that had been provided by my school. I also became very interested in the demoscene at this time and developed a taste for drawing using Deluxe Paint, I had quite a lot of success at this, I sold some art disks via a PD company and was quite highly regarded by my contemporaries in the Amiga Demo scene.

When I went to College to study my diploma in computing, there was a Novel network and it consisted of 386 sx's, there were a smattering of 486 dx2 machines in the college too, the CAD(computer aided design). people generally used these, the more naff 386's were reserved for programmers like me. Very unfair I thought as I wanted to write 3D routines on them in my lunch break! Nevertheless, College installed some excellent coding disciplines in me by making me learn some really bad languages. I had to use COBOL, Turbo Pascal and Quick Basic, these were cutting edge back then, and let's not forget that Windows hadn't even been invented when I was learning these languages. I passed my course and some of the programming disciplines must have sunk in. For instance, the web page you are looking at is written in php and my php generates W3C valid Transitional Xhtml 1.0, there's even a button at the bottom of each page you can click to check my code for errors ;-) Rest assured that during my lunch breaks I often fired up an 086 assembler for some wire frame vector chicanery! The lecturers made out that they were doing me a favour, but I think that secretly they liked my 3D demos.

I have never been interested in owning cutting edge systems, I believe it makes you a lazy programmer. All my code is written on a Dell that is about 4 years out of date. I got into web programming too since my days at college, I own and administrate a programming forum that covers a huge range of programming languages over many different platforms. Over the years as a web administrator I have had to learn as I have gone along, and been able to fix my forums when they have broken. As a result I have developed a lot of web coding knowledge too, and because my programming forum is popular, the members questions stretch my knowledge in all directions! I am a family man too, the only thing I can't work out is that somehow I ended up as a van driver, a programming position with a nice company would mean the fulfillment of a life-long goal.