I have been programming for about 35 years, for a large part of that time professionally (working mainly in C) but at the moment it's a sideline, although I am very keen to make it a larger part of my life if the opportunity arises.

These days I am more involved in Business and Technology Consultancy and tend to be concerned with management of large projects which have a software element rather then deeply involved in the building of software.

I am currently teaching myself to program in Java and Java EE. I love the elegance and beauty of Java but am coming from a non OO background so although I embrace OO I am working hard to understand how to apply it to real world problems.

I love the concept of Design Patterns and the way in which they help make the language of software engineering more structured and sophisticated.

As a programmer working mostly in my spare time and trying to keep up with a lot of technologies, some of which are moving quickly, I find it a much more challenging world than the one I started in where there were only a handful of programming languages and very few frameworks.

I have dabbled to a greater or lesser extent with the following languages / areas in my time:

• Pascal
• C
• Coral 66
• COBOL
• Assembler/Machine Code
• Perl
• Python
• JavaScript
• XML
• Java
• Ruby (On Rails)