Please note, this page is under construction. That is, either it contains unedited copy, is in itself in progress or yet to be completed, or is simply put, rubbish. So please read with a pinch of salt (and a wedge of lime and a shot of tequila).

Okay, the developer page is pretty dry. And yes, it’s not strictly just developer roles I’ve been involved with - I actually work as a Product Owner, just with a history in front end web design. What does this mean? Well, I’m very good at understanding and solving architectural problems… in broad strokes. Yes, I can get into the nitty gritty, and I’m damn good at interpreting error messages, or picking up new languages. But I am not a capable senior dev, the higher level/really performant code is not my concentration - but I can work well to bridge the gap between business requirements and a dev team.

But I thought I’d outline a bit of my experience so I have something on the page.

Old Days

For many years I played around with html, css and PhP using either wordpress or even drupal and joomla CMS. I built websites that did stuff but very much with single lines of PHP when needed, and I never really undestood what I was doing.

Bootcamp

Back in 2019 I took the plunge and took part in CodeClan, an 8 or 12 week bootcamp which turned young things into employable developers fluent in Javascript, ruby and Java. I needed a job, with a family on the way in my wife’s belly, that paid me the monthly big bucks. I thrived in this environment, not only because I had a lovely walkable commute into a cool building with purpose and brimming with youth, but I was also damn good at it. Nothing thrown my way was beyond my means, and i was able to spend most of my days making projects shiny and special, more than just functional, utilising my previously accrued skills in graphic design to provide much needed polish.

Portfolio/Personal Projects

A lot of my work currently stems on trying to set up projects that are as close to free as I can make it. This stems from previous. Therefore my current stack is hosting static websites built through jekyll and hosted on github pages, with the only cost being domain. From this set-up I have been

The reason I do this is

• free tiers on more dynamic hosting were becoming scarcer, meaning either projects were being lumped into pay-for tiers which did not suit the scope of the project and the overhead of maintaining projects to keep them on an active service was becoming a pain
• I previously spent hundreds of pounds on services that I did not need to host a website no-one visited because, well, I couldn’t work out how to unhost myself.
• It’s a fun challenge and keeps my projects low maintenance where possible
• It’s cheaper than the alternatives
• I get less service spam this way