My technical career started in 1997 after two years working as an administrator for the Information Technology Services Agency, which was part of the Department of Social Security (now Department of Work and Pensions) and has now been transferred to EDS.  I took advantage of a reskilling program within the Agency and began working on ICL (VME) based systems, using COBOL and IDMSX, first as a programmer and then as a designer.

I found that I had a natural aptitude for programming, something I had first become aware of as a school child when I would write programs in Commodore Basic for my VIC 20.

In October 1999 I moved to the Prototyping Team after and was trained in Java.  I began producing electronic claim forms for various Agencies within the DWP and acquired a lot of experience of building Graphical User Interfaces and of database connectivity.  Since then I have been producing intranet applications using a variety of technologies: HTML, Java Server Pages with Enterprise Javabeans, Active Server Pages, SQL Server, MySQL, JavaScript, VBScript and Perl.

More recently I have been training in C# in order to support ASP.NET applications.

Outside of EDS I have trained myself in PHP and MASON and have used these together with my other skills to design and create a number of websites, ranging from commercial sites to online community sites and social groups.