I grew up in a household full of music, so I've always loved it. I'm especially fond of jazz and the guitar. I don't have any formal musical training, but I've played guitar in my own amateurish way since I was a teenager.
I'm also fond of motor cycles. I started riding when I was 17, but although I've had bikes almost all the time since, they've generally spent far too long in the garage. In 2009 I joined the Institute of Advanced Motorists and took their advanced test, then joined one of their organised trips to France. This was a great experience, and spending time on the road with more experienced riders including police instructors is a terrific way of gaining both ability and confidence.
I've recently become interested in sailing and have gained some RYA certifications in yachts and powerboats, so if you have a boat and are in need of crew please get in touch!
Computers have fascinated me since the late 1970s. Unlike many people who came to computers through the ZX-80, ZX-81, TRS-80 and BBC Micro I was interested more in electronics than computing and saw those machines more for what they could do in controlling other systems than what they could do for information processing and of course entertainment. I learnt computer languages from the bottom up, starting with assembly language and later C. My Damascus moment was my first experience of using an Apple Macintosh, and grasping the notion that computers could be made easy to use by anyone. The ease-of-use mantra was fascinating to me, and most of my work for the next ten years was freelance work driven by this interest in personal/desktop computing and user interfaces on both PCs and Macs.
By the year 2000 I had a young family and my priorities had moved towards job security, and I moved back into permanent employment. However this was accompanied by a shift away from hands-on technical work and more into management, business development and mentoring. At the same time the industry focus was moving away from client-side development to web-based server-side applications, and my software development skills were becoming slightly stale. In about 2009 I decided to do something about this and started to recover the lost ground, gaining certifications in Java and Oracle and developing applications with more modern dynamic languages and frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Grails. In 2014 I joined HTK, which offered me the opportunity to become hands-on again, and I've recently been concentrating on gaining some certifications in the AWS cloud technology we use for HTK Horizon.
I'm also supposed to be spending my spare time exercising, but although I'm a regular dog walker my attendance at the gym and the pool seem to be rapidly descending into the category of...