I have a BSc degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from Birmingham University, as well as over ten years experience in developing for the Web.

I still have a hands-on role at 3form, and when I’m developing something I’m most comfortable working on my Mac using open source software, platforms and components.

The platform of choice for all of my new web applications is Ruby on Rails - an open source rapid application development framework that enables me to get ideas out quickly onto the screen to do rapid prototyping and even the odd ‘website in a day’ experiment: see 5alist and isowish.

The majority of my past web projects were built using PHP and MySQL using a variety of open source systems (WordPress, 4Gallery), or our own software 3edit and  _Underscore.

In the past I’ve dabbled with Microsoft-based systems, and for 18 months oversaw the production of an ASP.NET 1.1 content management system, but I have firmly decided on open source development as my preferred route.

I’m a hand-coder so I work in a text editor to produce XHTML, CSS and Javascript in standards-compliant code. And I’m a keen ActionScripter when I’m using Flash.

Over the years I’ve worked with lots of different languages including:

Java, C, C++, Ruby, Prolog, Javascript, ActionScript, Perl, PHP, ASP, ASP.Net, BASIC, Visual BASIC, SQL, HTML, XML, XSLT, VRML, AppleScript and probably more that I’ve forgotten!