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Awesome Apps, Wonderful Websites, Mammoth Marketing, A Class Advice and Slick Solutions!
Awesome Apps, Wonderful Websites, Mammoth Marketing, A Class Advice and Slick Solutions!
October 2017 - October 2019
Before coronavirus few had heard of UltraViolet Light Disinfection, but I had been working with UltraViolet Light Cleaning machines for two years with Skytron.
My job was to upgrade the existing app that worked on ruggedised SONIM handsets to interface with the new RaspberryPI (eventually TinkerBoard) 'brains' being put in the top of the machines (see photo showing testing of a single device clean).
Developed a Laravel based cloud system for the management and reporting of cleans throughout hospitals.
Raspbian, TinkerOS, NodeRed, WebSockets, CouchDB, PouchDB, Cordova, Angular, TypeScript, Ionic, Laravel, CoreUI.
January 2016 - May 2017
My stint at Virgin Wines in hindsight was excellent, although it was clear I had the travelling bug inside me throughout my stay there. I turned up just as they were halfway through a very painful and scope creeping full platform change, technically this was an intensive SASS/CSS experience to take the never ending design concepts from the design department and to put them into markup and styling, in anticipation for the new website launch.
As well as honing my CSS/SASS skills, I learnt about build tools, working with QA teams, using a CSS atomic library in Pattern Labs, and I managed to get a tiny bit of Angular practice in there as well.
May 2014 - December 2015
After experiencing programmer / entrepreneur burnout, I decided to take a step back for a while. I travelled to America for six months during this period, having many wonderful experiences. I also visited more of Germany, Holland and France. For work during this period I continued with supporting the booking system, of which the companies involved were beginning to get superseeded by the march of civilization; and provided small bits of web design, custom programming and I rediscovered my love of graphic design, producing brochures, sponsorship documents, stationary and flyers, in particular for a London events company.
Whilst being my partner in crime for a long time, I eventually realised caffeine is an insecticide and contains no nutrients or energy. After giving it up I felt a whole lot better. (This is not medical advice, do I really need this disclaimer!)
The problem with tech is there is always more to do, more people to compete against, more things to learn. When mixing long hours over many years especially with pouring endless central nervous stimulants down your throat (i.e. coffee) and the popular programmer fast food diet (pizza)... you are always going to crash. Ultimately getting through it you come out with a more balanced and healthy perspective on career and life.
Feb 2012 - May 2014
As I continued with support of the booking system, I returned to my home town of Norwich and applied for a Web Development role at Norwich & Norfolk University Hospital. Whilst there were frustrations, in hindsight this was a truly wonderful job working with all the excellent positive people at the NHS. I was afforded a great degree of autonomy as I helped with the daily requirements of an IT department whilst maintaining and building new IT systems.
Ward View was a pilot web application with a primary focus on bed management, but also blending in some test results. Deployed on large hospital grade 55" touch screens positioned in appropriate places, staff had a visual birds eye view of where patients were, together with conditions, notifications and test results.
With some initial help from an external agency for the design, I integrated and deployed the new NNUH website using WordPress as the content management system. It also integrated with Apache Solr to help with the extensive documents needing to be available to the public.
Jan 2009 - Feb 2012
My main project of this era was in developing a fairly innovative ticket booking system. There weren't many booking systems available at this time, and mine allowed a variety of different configurations for venue attendance. This served a ticket operator in the midlands (Access Entertainment) and a tourist attraction (Dickens World) in Kent. In hindsight, this would have made a wonderful startup, but 'startup' wasn't even a thing back then!
As well as the booking system, I embarked on my solo freelance career in London, enjoying the plethora of business and networking events available to the aspiring entrepeneur.in this era I worked with a dozen or so SMEs - business consultants, authors, financial companies and fitness startups.
During this time I was also hosting Digital Marketing seminars in partnership with GLE London. Online marketing was very much Google oriented back then, with social media & marketing not having fully exploded onto the scene yet.
Dec 2006 - Jan 2009
Back in these days the web was a remarkably different (and smaller!) place. After graduating from Portsmouth University with a BSc in Digital Media Technology, myself and a good friend formed Tidy Design, which provided some, quite honestly, wonderfully looking Macromedia Flash driven websites (the creativity of Flash sites is greatly missed on the web now, and yet no-one knows it) and HTML websites with a bit of PHP and Javascript.
Fresh faced out of University with the whole world to take on, we had a great few years working together with some fantastic customers and projects.
Our tools of the choice in this era were the wonderful Macromedia products, Flash MX and Dreamweaver MX.
