|
More About Me |
|
This page contains brief details of my life including places I have lived and my career etc. I will add further details in due course. Use the links below to position to a particular section. In The
Beginning I was born in 1967 in the historic town of Evesham in the heart of the UK midlands county of Worcester. My pre-teen years were spent in a nearby country village called Badsey at the foot of the Cotswold hills. This country environment proved to be a safe and relaxing place to spend my early years.
I went to the local primary school in Badsey and then onto Blackminster Middle School. In 1980 my family moved to Pickering in Ryedale North Yorkshire where I continued my education at Lady Lumleys School where I remained for my GCSE examinations. I achieved 8 O Levels which afforded me the opportunity to go to the local Technical College in 1983, to further my studies in computers. My interest in computers had started in late 1982 when the physics teacher at Lady Lumleys, Mr. Wilson, introduced me to the BBC micro and Sinclair ZX81. I started programming and soon became the owner of a VIC 20 and shortly after a Sinclair Spectrum 48k.
I began writing games software and had a small publishing deal before I started Technical College at Scarborough in 1983 - the first year of the BTEC computer studies course in the UK. I graduated 2 years later with a distinction. During my time at college I realised and hoped that IT was going to become my career. I found the whole subject absolutely fascinating - particularly the programming and architecture sides.
My first job began in 1985 in a small engineering company called Micrometalsmiths Ltd who were based in Kirkbymoorside at the foot of the North Yorkshire Moors. I worked as a software engineer developing low level operating system programs on the Apple IIe and Mac platforms. Since the company was very small, in terms of IT, I became responsible for all aspects of IT at the company including network management, technical support, software development, purchasing etc. During my time at Micrometalsmiths I learned a great deal about all aspect of business and IT. Micrometalsmiths expanded their IT function into CAD/CAM which I was heavily involved in. Eventually they established a small software house division called Wittrick CIM under the management of Steve Wittrick. Steve was a great guy with the vision to pioneer seamlessly integrated hardware and software modules which we developed using TODAY 4GL technology on both Mac and Unix platforms. We also identified and incorporated technologies such as non-contact transponders, data collection devices and robotics.
Working For Comet Group Plc In 1990 I decided to expand my career into more commercial data processing and moved to COMET Group Plc in Hull on the East Coast. I quickly became responsible for the support of the after sales service systems which comprised of 30 or so distributed Unix systems running 4GL bespoke applications. This included technical support and software development. In 1993 I retrained with AS/400 skills to support a 'right sizing' migration from the Unix systems onto the AS/400 platform. Myself and Ken Barber, a brilliant project manager, progressed the project right through the project life-cycle to successful delivery of an AS/400 after sales service solution. This was based on the Orchard system but was heavily developed in house by myself and a small team of contractors using SYNON - the well known AS/400 CASE tool.
I started contracting in 1994 with COMET after they decided to relocate to Rickmansworth near London. I spent a further 2 years working on the project developing additional supply chain, picking, job tracking, purchasing and job scheduling modules. In 1996 I began contracting for Iceland Frozen Foods, now known as Iceland.co.uk were I initially developed interfaces between client PC's and an AS/400 host for their buyer forecasting systems. I continued contracting for Iceland until March 2000 by which time I had worked on a large number of critical projects in the supply chain and central systems on both AS/400 and PC based platforms.
Working For Iceland.co.uk I decided to continue my long term career working for Iceland not least of all because it IS a great place to work and Chester is a wonderful City overlooked by the mountains of North Wales. Since March 2000 I have played a key role in implementing their latest retail system based on the IBM Supermarket Application (SA). My main areas of responsibility have been in the areas of back office systems which are NT server based utilising IBM DB2/UDB. I have helped develop and configure the UDB installation and have also developed interfaces to the host AS/400 systems. Click here for
my current CV in MS Word 97 format
A couple of interests I have decided to add here are mountain biking and my poetry both of which have their own pages so I won't include any further details on this one. I am also a very keen Rock Guitar player. I don't play in bands or anything like that, I am more of an improvisor. My main influences are Neo Classical styles and players such as Yngwie Malmsteen and Mat Bellamy of Muse.
|
| [ home | site map | back | forward | top ] |