What I've done

  • 4GLs
  • I started coding on a Commodore PET back in the 80s, before moving into 4GLs including DBASE and something called "Sensible Solution"

  • Unix
  • Joining Cumbria County Council in the early 90s I became part of the Unix support team, looking afer the County's network of ICL DRS6000's.

    My unix skills have come in handy since I switched to Linux on my home PC

  • MS-VB/VB.NET
  • My experience with Microsoft began with Access 1.0, before moving into Visual Basic and VB.NET

  • Borland Delphi
  • A personal favourite of mine, as it offered compiled code long before Microsoft got their act together with VB. I used this more as an educational tool - very good for ActiveX/DLL development

  • MS-SharePoint
  • In the late 90s I set up Cumbria County Councils first schools extranet using SharePoint 2001. I developed several bespoke "web parts" to extend the site functionality

  • Web development
  • HTML, ASP/ASP.NET, Javascript, XML and so on. The skill here is the ability to seamlessly join together different client/server side technologies to present a slick, functional interface through the web browser. The challenging aspect about web development is it never stands still, so your skill-base has to move with it

  • Server Technologies
  • At Cumbria County Council I learnt IIS and SQL-Server administration

  • WAI Standards
  • Developing public-facing sites for Cumbria County Council, I gained invaluable knowledge of the "do"s and "don't"s of accessible web development (thank you SOCITM!) migrating from tables to "liquid" layouts using CSS