I’m primarily a PHP & web developer, but can also wield a pretty good virtual paintbrush and pen in Photoshop and Illustrator, and I have a keen interest in cars and motorsport and before plunging for a full-time career as a developer, I used to be a motor mechanic.
My "coding career" started at the age of 8, whilst reading and copying code from books and magazines and hammering them into my Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k back in the '80s. This grew further after replacing the Speccy with a Commodore Amiga A500+ where I started to use AMOS, ACE Basic and some very simple C and Assembly.
It was in 2000 when I finally discovered the "interweb" and put together my first Geocities page with a PII 350Mhz box (this was finally ditched late 2013(!) after long being relegated to performing DNS, NAT and firewall services running on FreeBSD). After this held restrictions with what I could do, I discovered Sambar Server and a few years later, Apache running on a Win2K box.
I decided my first real web project was going to be a guestbook (these were all the rage back then!), so I searched around for something I could develop it with and came across Perl. For some obscure reason after this, I ported the guestbook to ASP with help from ChiliSoft ASP. This was short-lived and it was ported again after I discovered PHP (version 4.0.1). After the guestbook, I fancied something a bit more "meaty" and took to writing my own forum software. Whilst this worked, with users, threads and posts (in somewhat of a basic format, but looking much like vBulletin 2.x), thinking back now, this was probably inherently flawed with security issues as I hadn't long discovered PHP and writing a full-blown forum single-handed in 3 months was never going to be rock solid!.. but it paved the way for future learning of PHP and of Unix systems as by this time, my Win2K box as a server had been pushed aside to desktop duties only to make way for a FreeBSD 4.x dedicated server sitting under my desk.
Now, my projects have included custom, bespoke control panels, bespoke content management systems, web service integrations, responsive design, APIs, system architecture, open-source PHP packages and have worked for individuals and large international corporations both as an employed developer and a freelance developer.
As an aside to my web development, I also enjoy hacking away with some C++ and C# projects and develop basic windows applications that I release on clue-by-4.org. I also still enjoy writing the odd Perl script and seem to have a strange warmth towards Regex.