About Me

I'm an Application Development Consultant working for Microsoft in the UK, and have been programming for a quarter of a century since I first got my hands on a ZX80 at school. Needless to say a few things have changed in that time, but one thing that hasn't is my passion for tinkering with computers.

In that time I've used many languages and my current language of choice is C#. Before that I'd used all of the following in greater or lesser measure: Z80 Assembler, Basic, Pascal, Vax Macro assembly language, Modula-2, Forth, Z, OBJ, C, C++, x86 Assembler, Smalltalk, VGL, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder & finally Occam.

I started my commerical experience at VG Elemental in Winsford, where I had an excellent year as an industrial placement student. VG have long since been bought out and are now part of the Thermo Electron coproration, but when I was there it was just a small group of UK companies. Here's an image of the type of machine I was working on at the time. I had a great time at Elemental and got to write a bunch of fun stuff - top of the list has to be the code I wrote to blast bits of rock with an industrial scale laser.

After graduating with a 2.1 in Computer Studies I then went to work for VG LabSystems, which over time morphed into Thermo LabSystems as they were also purchased by Thermo Electron (along with a few others over the years). I worked at LabSystems for 12.5 years, starting as a Junior Software Engineer, and working my way up to Development Manager (sounds grand, wasn't really!). I had a great time at LabSystems and did a wide variety of work whilst there, which included plenty of travel to far flung places on the globe. One of the best trips was 4 weeks in Hawaii. All good things come to an end and in 2001 I decided to up sticks and move to Microsoft.

I've now been at Microsoft since December 2001 and work in Premier Support for Developers. Don't let the name fool you - I'm not the support desk (PSS is, to those in the know). PSfD on the other hand is a bunch of 20+ of the brightest technical folk you are ever likely to meet - I'm amazed they let me in!.

The way PSfD works is as follows. Our customers sign up for somewhere between 150 and 1200 hours a year (in 150 hour increments), and get one or more of us lot to help them out with whatever they are working on. We typically only get involved with development projects, and have skills in Visual Studio development, Microsoft languages (C,C++,C#,VB), SQL, BizTalk and a few others too. It's not all work - we get time to spend boning up on new stuff, and part of the work includes assisting customers through technology adoption programmes at Microsoft (otherwise known as TAPs). There's a lot of great stuff our team works on, and *we're hiring* so if this grooves your truffles pop me an email and we'll see what happens.

For an idea of the kind of stuff we work on, check out the PSfD blog here.