Computers

As with many people of my age who work in the IT industry, my first experience of using computers came from the 1980s home micros. In 1982 my mum bought my dad a Sinclair ZX81 as a Christmas present. My dad played with it for a couple of weeks but never really got to grips with it (he's still a technophobe to this day!) but I sat down and started reading through the instruction manual and gradually learned how the thing works.

My parents were obviously immensely pleased that I seemed to have found a hobby that was educational, after all I could have been whizzing around the streets on a skateboard or something instead. To encourage me my mum bought me a couple of computer magazines (PCW and Sinclair User if I remember rightly). Big mistake. Huge! For the last couple of years I (and my sisters) had been pestering our parents to get that pinnacle of entertainment technology, an Atari 2600 console. This had always been denied on the grounds that we spent too much time glued to the telly as it was, without having games available on it as well. But by buying me the computer magazines my mum had unwittingly shown me that a ZX81 was more than just a glorified calculator: it could be used for that banned and illicit passtime: computer games!

Keying in programs from computer magazines, and then going over the source code line by line to find out why it wouldn't work, I (and many tens of thousands of other kids) quickly became fairly proficient at hacking out BASIC programs for microcomputers. Over the years I graduated up to a Sinclair Spectrum and then later on a BBC Micro (a true hackers computer if ever there was one). I was fortunate enough to go to a school which was investing quite heavily in its Computer department, and by the time I applied to university I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

It was after uni that I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do. After doing a variety of non-computer related jobs I have been variously a FoxPro programmer, a network and systems support technician, a sysadmin, a Visual Basic developer, a C programmer and now I work mostly in Perl.

What I do these days consists mostly of designing and implementing the database backends to websites -- in other words, what the marketing people love to call "Content Management". I personally think it's quite a rewarding segment of the industry, as it makes use not only of my abilities as a coder, but usually I also have to be up-to-date on the latest standards for (X)HTML, CSS and XML, as well as being able to talk SQL to a variety of databases (MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL in particular).

At home I run a variety of machines, mostly using Linux although assorted Microsoft and FreeBSD Operating Systems can also be found.