Currently between roles and working from home 4 days a week (doing personal development - been teaching myself java) while waiting for my new role within the organisation I am employed by. I have, since March this year, learned java and coded a simple tool to stamp PDF documents with an image (using the iText Library). User interface (using Swing) allows user to pick the image to stamp the documents with, pick a position on the page and pick a document or folder of documents to stamp. It was to serve a need for my team to stamp documents in a large archive for releas to the general public.

I am currently working on my dream coding project which I originally thought of about 13 years ago which involves complex data structures which VBA/Visual Basic would not have been able to implement easily. I looked at C++ 11 years ago (having coded using C and Pascal many years before) but found that it had the power to handle my data structure but was lacking in the easy to use GUIs of Visual Basic. Learning java has meant I can now develop the application as it has easy to use GUI libraries AND the power beneath to use custom data structures with the portability to use on different platforms.

Wrote my first program at school making pencil marks on 80 column cards which were read by a "travelling computer" that took up the whole back wall of a classroom and the school only got for a couple of weeks a year! Soon after, the school started to get Sinclair ZX-81 computers and I was a member of a lunchtime computer club it the maths department's store cupboard where we stood around a ZX-81 while one of us tapped in programs - remember the "white-outs"? Soon after my father (who was a teacher) used to borrow a ZX-81 one evening a fortnight that I used to tap in programs on the dining-room table at home. A year or so later and I had bought myself a ZX Spectrum which I programmed. In Higher Education I learned to program in an Algol based language called s-Algol. In my first IT job I did extensive programming in Lotus 1-2-3's macro language for 2-3 years and a bit of Turbo Basic. Back in Higher Education I learned to program in Turbo Pascal and C (both ANSI and Turbo) dabbling in Lisp, Prolog and briefly in Modula 2 and Fortran IV. Worked in Abredeenshire schools for 9 years running a multi-server network on Lan Manager and later NTFS learned some Visual Basic. went back to college and trained as an ICT and Computing teacher learned to program in Comal and more Visual Basic. Then moved to a HM Government Department in the South West where I have had the infrequent opportunity to write small data processing programs in VB and VBA (in Excel and Outlook).