Born in England, raised and educated in Scotland; I have chosen to live my life (for now) on an island in the southern Gulf of Thailand, Koh Phangan is my home.

My initial route into IT came through the hardware engineering area until I switched my degree course over to software engineering. By the time I left University I was pretty fluent in Java, was more than capable of coding with VB.NET, and rather enjoyed C++. I haven't used any of them since!

At that stage in my life we chose to relocate from sunny Scotland(!) to a small tropical island in Thailand; as you do. After a few successful years operating a small shop offering computer repair services I grew frustrated watching anti-virus scans and replacing bits of systems. I had always offered website design and development services but was always too busy fixing machines to focus on my true love; code.

So I closed the shop; left the shutters down for 18 months and moved my desks upstairs; a radical move at the time. I chose to throw myself down the route of the freelance web developer, soaking up as much as I could about HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript.

After all these years I am well versed in all of them and enjoy nothing better than battering out a sweet piece of code. When a script runs for the first time and it does what it is supposed to is a very satisfying moment.

I would probably describe myself more as a front-end engineer with leanings towards user experience design methodologies.

Working as a freelancer means that you have to do everything yourself. I am self taught in every area of the web design process from wire-framing techniques to designing in the browser. To succeed in this industry you have to be constantly learning and taking in information from as many places as possible. As web developers we have such fantastic resources available to us in the form of blogs, books, tools, code standards and education.

Many people have created wonderful tools, services and protocols and contributed them to the community to make our jobs more efficient and opening up endless possibilities.

I look forward to exploring those possibilities.