I grew up with the BBC Micro (favourite game Chucky Egg) and then our first family PC which was the 386sx (the first game I remember playing on that was Sim City).

I started coding with BBC Basic at home, then after high school GCSE's pursued software engineering by doing a BTEC National Diploma in Computer Studies at the local sixth form college where we used GW Basic and COBOL. I went straight on from there to UMIST (University of Manchester) where I gained my BSc (Hons) Computation (2.i) degree in computer science.

I created my first website in 1994 in my halls of residence (Weston Hall) at university, coding a simple hangman game onto one of the pages and a few other simple text manipulation games. I also taught myself network sockets and the Perl programming language whilst coding a BBS for fun in my spare time on Linux.

After graduating I got a job coding a job search website and have been coding the back end (server-side) of websites for businesses since then (bespoke online courses, shopping systems, insurance quotes, recruitment systems, financial reports, live chats, all sorts!), mostly using PHP and Java Servlets. Although I did also code a few Windows desktop applications in the early years of my career (Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic).

I closed down my website development business in 2022, my small business clients having suffered during the pandemic, but have found I miss coding, and so continue to do bits and pieces for my own use. You can find a few, hopefully helpful, tips on tweaking Shopify code in my new blog (as of 2024) below.

My graphic design business, Flaming Imp (started in about 2010), continues and you can find my cute and nerdy science designs on this site - or commission me to create something for you :)