History

Most people would stick their résumé here, but I've decided to dedicate this page to some skeletons from my cupboard...

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In 1980 I accidentally became one of the last people on earth to be trained as a commercial morse code operator.

For the next 10 years I was gainfully employed as an officer in the Australian coastal radio service, pushing manual digital communication speeds to the limit (about 2 characters a second)

Around about 1987 I finally noticed what the rest of the world had taken for granted 20 years earlier - that the age of morse was over.

I was still too young to retire on a pension, so I looked for something else to do with the rest of my life and drew up some guidelines for my new career:

1. Must still be in demand in the year 2020.

2. Must be interesting enough to work at for 40 years.

3. Has to give me some autonomy (I really wanted to work from home).

My first choice was maternity, but I had some gender related challenges which proved impossible to overcome. This only left computer programming...

Having made the decision, the rest was easy. I picked up a state-of-the-art 8086, a copy of DOS 3.1 (with a BASIC interpreter) and launched into my programming career, writing a few utilities for my fellow radio officers. 

The programs were pretty well received (no-one hit me), so I kept on coding, and since then I've written and maintained commercial applications in C, x86 assembly language, Digital Systems MUMPS, Pascal, Clipper, Visual Basic, PERL and Microsoft Active Server Pages.

I've also set up and run a Novell NetWare WAN, dial-up bulletin board, Australia wide intranet, and Internet servers (Apaché on BSD Unix and IIS on an NT4 server) - the usual sort of stuff a programmer of the '90s went through. 

And the goals? Well I think the demand will still be there in another 20 years, I'm still intensely interested in the field, and I've been working from home now since 1994. Oh, and I should mention that I married my perfect partner in 1988 and we've had 3 beautiful children together.

I-remember-when mode OFF 

See some real live examples of my work on the portfolio page