I got my first computer (an Atari 130XE) in 1987 (nothing before that really counts). I’ve had about 23 since then. I ran a BBS for 5 years and have lived in Dunedin, Napier, Western Australia and the UK. I am married with four gorgeous kids (everyone’s own kids are gorgeous). I have been working full-time as a web developer since 2003 and started dabbling in 1996. I’m currently employed full-time with Turboweb and have been since 2008. I like it here, we do cool stuff :)

Here’s a list of other stuff that I do:

  • I’m a web developer - I develop for the Open Source rebels (not the Microsoft Alliance).
  • I brew beer and plenty of it. I’ve brewed beer for a wedding. I love hops and plenty of them.
  • API integration (all sorts, but notably DPS, Chargify and Xero).
  • I homeschool my kids along with my wife and mother-in-law. Homeschooling is not thing you do from 9am to 3pm, it’s a way of life so even though I work full-time there’s plenty of opportunity to get involved.
  • I’m comfortable with large scale environment provisioning and virtualisation (with VirtualBox and LXC).
  • I am a 1st gup in Taekwon-Do - I train with the awesome crew at Mosgiel Taekwon-do.
  • I do a bunch of MySQL administration and schema design. I make Linux work.
  • I listen to a range of Podcasts, including Bad Voltage, The QI podcast, TechSNAP, Linux Action Show and Skeptoid.
  • I do all things DNS related (domain registration, renewals, UDAI stuff, zone configs).
  • I’m actively involved in the Dunedin CodeCraft group (meets monthly) and the associated Hackathon even (also meets monthly).
  • I run an email server for our clients (about 750 email accounts) on exim, plus spamassassin and roundcube for webmail.
  • I have a scooter (a Yamaha Beewee YW100) and it’s excellent.
  • I write documentation for projects (project scoping, end-user, developer) and I enjoy it.
  • I play board games (not nearly as much as my wife) such as Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, Pandemic, Power Grid, Ticket To Ride (not for a while though).
  • I use source control a lot, mostly mercurial, a little SVN (we’ve migrated svn => hg).
  • System Administration (mostly Debian and Ubuntu Linux, a little Win Server 2003, IIS etc).
  • I watch a lot of british comedy - anything with Simon Pegg or Nick Frost, Spaced, anything with Ricky Gervais where he’s not over the top (An Idiot Abroad was too much), any british standup comedy. RIP Rik Mayall.
  • I’m not a graphic designer but I’m very proficient in CSS (including responsive design) and image manipulation
  • I like to exercise while I listen to my podcasts. I need to do more of it because it doesn’t look like I like to exercise and my podcast list is long ;)
  • Front end development with javascript, regularly using plain JS, jQuery, knockout.js and all sorts of AJAX stuff.