About Me!

My first IT job was on an internal help desk for a large insurance company. I had no qualifications and no previous experience for the job; but fortunately the interviewer was a computer enthusiast so when I talked about building PCs, setting up home networks and messing about with open-source software, the job offer was practically a certainty.

The job was quiet, which gave me the perfect excuse to begin learning HTML, CSS and loads of other general computer-related stuff. After a couple of years of geeking out, the help desk was closed and the team made redundant. Luckily I had already befriended a few members of the desktop support team and so was able to sidestep into a waiting vacancy with that department.

As before, I had plenty of time on my hands during the working day and by this point had already been writing web design tutorials for a couple of years, so this job was perfect for really honing my web skills. At this point I knew I wanted to work in the web design industry so when, a year or so later, a front-end development position came up at a local e-commerce agency, I was quick to apply.

Once more I found myself sitting a job interview for a position for which I no formal qualifications for and no real, professional experience in. My enthusiasm for clean code and current best-practice, as well as a few years of writing about web development, helped land the job. I’ve since moved on to pastures new, but still look back on my first web design job with fondness.

So that’s how I became a web developer. And the writing? I was always happy writing, but never really considered doing anything with it until I won a short-story writing competition at the insurance company for which I worked at the time. The prize was an all-inclusive shopping trip to New York, and shorlty after I returned from that I saw an advert on DevShed’s web site for web design article and tutorial writers.

This was just after I started working on the help desk; one of the reasons I decided to learn about web design (aside from pure interest) was so that I could write about it – I found that I could fall into all the common pitfalls, and then write about how to avoid them. This was also the period of time that I became enamored with JavaScript.

And that’s pretty much it, the story so far so to speak. I still enjoy the challenges of front-end development and continue to write books and articles on web design.

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