Introduction

These pages serve a dual purpose. Firstly, they meet my need to present a lengthy curriculum vitae in a manageable way by breaking it into sections and allowing the reader to browse what interests them. With over 30 years experience in IT, when asked for my employment history, I feel like a plumber asked to list every one of his customers throughout his working life. Using this style, you can see the detail if you want to, but you can also easily just look at recent history, which is the most relevant.

Secondly, they demonstrate the use of a number of current technologies employed in website development including:

  • The Master Page approach in ASP.Net to presenting a collection of pages in a consistent way, with easy navigation between them.
  • The widespread use of XSL transforms to extract different sections of CV data from an underlying XML document.
  • The use of a Web Service (CVService) to expose the CV data with different methods to retrieve different parts.
  • The value of CSS for page layout, as opposed to complex Tables.

To pull up a given part of my employment history, or to look at details like my education and training, just click on the hyperlinks to the left, which are part of the Site Master page. The detail you request is displayed in the main body of the page.

Personal Summary

I've had a long and fascinating career in the IT industry. I started with punched cards and paper-tape and have performed in a wide range of roles using an even wider range of technologies. I have written bootstrap loader programs, device drivers, and tinkered with operating system internals. I have seen and taken part in the progression from mainframe to client/server to 3-tier to n-tier to distributed service-oriented architecture.

I have seen the transition from spaghetti to structured programming to object-orientation, and the corresponding design and development methodologies from beer-mat to data-flow to UML.

In terms of roles, I have been a programmer, an analyst, a designer, a team-leader, a project manager, and a systems development manager.

Personal Objectives

My personal objective is to keep on learning. In an industry where skills have an ever shorter lifespan, and where it seems that one can learn continually without seeming to get significantly wiser, the excitement and satisfaction of using the latest approaches are as strong as ever.