I’m a software developer with nearly 30 years of Java experience. Before that I was a Borland Delphi developer. I’m originally from Manchester, UK, and am back here now after spending 15 years living in the US.

I’ve spent a lot of time programming after starting with a Commodore 64 when I was 10 years old. I moved on to an Amstrad CPC 6128 where I marveled at the wonders of its floppy disk drive and started writing in Z80 Assembly Language using Maxam by Arnor Software.

Later I had an Amiga and soon started learning 68000 Assembly language by writing mini-demos and games. I wrote a few articles that were published in disk magazines which is how information was shared at the time, especially since the internet wasn’t a thing and like most people I didn’t have a phone for bulletin boards.

I then started working on a PC with a C++ compiler where I became interested in both real-time and photorealistic 3D graphics. Once I graduated from university, I took a job at an accounting firm and on my second day there, I was given a copy of Borland Delphi and told to go learn it. I worked as a consultant for a while and since I was away from home a lot, I would spend time reading up on Java which was new at the time.

Since then I’ve been a big fan of Java, from the early days of 1.4 through EJB, JSP, Sun, JDeveloper, Swing, Spring, Java EE, Hibernate, Seam, ORMs, JSF, Wicket, unit testing, design patterns. I’ve pretty much watched it all come to fruition and in some cases, fade away.

Professionally, for the last few years I’ve been working on debugger tooling at ARM.

I started a blog well over a decade ago, blogging about Java, JSF, software development and even a few recipes. I hadn’t written much for a few years, and when I came back I wanted a fresh space. So the old blog is still available here, but I’m not maintaining it.

I’ve moved to Hugo as I just want somewhere I can easily write Markdown posts and publish them. I’ll be writing more about software engineering, mostly in Java. I have a few articles in mind going forward and some small projects which I’ll be blogging about. There’s been quite a few changes to Java and the development space over the last few years, so plenty of writing to catch up on.