By Way Of Introduction

Thanks for dropping by! This is a first foray for me into the world of topical blogging.

I'm starting this more or less midway in working life: my first job was at MacDonalds which I started just before I turned fifteen, and if I retire at sixty-five then I'm just a year or so shy of half way there.

A few years ago I went through a professional mid life crisis of sorts, left a good job in R&D at Canon and went to teach English overseas. I leant Spanish well enough to make good friends and to get back into IT while living in Madrid, I ended up working in a large bank, a job that made Dilbert's world look positively functional, I learnt a lot.

I saved some pennies and headed to London a took a job based on how I wanted to work and what I wanted to learn. I've been here a year and half, and it's still a good job. A lot of this blog will be about the priorities I've developed through those experiences.

It's about the profession of software development, the developers toolkit I use and the way we work. It's also about technology in my day to day, the toys and tools that I want for myself.

Right now I'm not looking at being team lead or any senior role, although I actively take on any load to help the folks who do have those roles, so the perspective will be of a largely content senior developer. It's part of me learning to be a better developer, pulling knowledge from different sources, being conscious of my own character: a tendency to think of developers as humans with human motivations; conscious of the balancing act between ideal solutions and effective compromise; drawing on experiences that include academic research, name brand hardware development, big bank back office, and super-agile small-company web applications.

My own hobby programming will enter the picture. Right now that includes a web based tools, things that can work on mobiles phones as well as the desktop: delphi method tool for capturing requirements, particularly for becoming conscious about "forgotten" legacy requirements, and an ear trainer for guitarists that I want to run on smart phones.

I daily use a very pretty little MacBook at home, and have a thumping great big Linux box under my desk at work. I'm still tossing up between Android and iPhone . I've spent years working with Microsoft Windows. Ultimately I'm technologically agnostic, I've been around long enough to know it'll change, and that's it's good enough to be mostly satisfied, and better not to be too attached to specifics and details.