My Background

I had a varied career prior to going to university in 1991 to study Computing Science with French. I graduated in 1995 having specialised in Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence and Simulation. My final year project was a natural language translator written in C.

Shortly after leaving university, I became a computing teacher in London.

I became interested in the Web in 1998 and wrote a couple of rudimentary sites. In 2000, I started the Roo Training Solutions Website as a means to teach myself Web design/development. It is a directory of IT training providers in Greater London.

The site started as pure HTML but it became apparent very quickly that this was not practicable for a dynamic Website. I taught myself Perl, a language well suited to deal with large amounts of text and based on C. Using a local Access database, I wrote scripts to compile/upload the Website each time a training provider's details were added/amended. Talk about 'round the houses'!

Fortunately, in 2001 I discovered PHP, which is partially based on Perl, and MySQL which greatly simplified the entire process.

In 2004, I was given the opportunity to work in Web development on a commercial project and have never looked back.