I studied Computing at The University of Manchester, graduating in 1998 with a BSc (Hons) 2:1. On this course we were taught a number of programming paradigms including functional, procedural and object oriented programming. We studied C, Java and some obscure functional languages. My final year project was written in TCL/TK however.

Upon graduating, I spent 10 months working on ESQL/C mainframe systems for polling financial terminals before realising this was totally the wrong career for me and joining the internet revolution. I switched to a web development company who produced major web applications for big blue-chip customers. Initially I was working with Microsoft ASP 3.0 with SQL Server databases. I switched for a while to work with Vignette, an enterprise CMS framework which at the time meant development in TCL again. Following that, I joined the Java team for a short stint, witting a reports and maintenance application for a colossal data warehouse. I served out the rest of my tenure at that company back in the Microsoft Team working again with ASP 3.0, Visual Basic 6 and SQL Server.

Currently, I work for a company that does product development, which is a very different world to project development. We use Microsoft technologies for web based applications, ASP 3.0, VB6, SQL Server 2000 and now we’re phasing in .NET 2.0 using C#.

My professional bias is clearly for Microsoft, but that just happens to be where I’ve ended up working. I really don’t care what language and platform I use. Outside of work I use exclusively Open Source tools and languages for hobby projects (like InAnger.com). I am a very strong believer in keeping an open mind about the tools I use. I evaluate and examine every new thing out there to see whether it can make things better at work or in my experimentation at home. I believe in using the optimal tool for the job, and that comes first before any bias for an operating system or anything else.

Of course, generally the kinds of things I do, I feel strongly are best achieved in a scripting language. There are places where writing C and compiling native binaries is the ideal and optimal choice. However; I don’t really do that kind of work.

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