A CV of a sort…
It feels like I’ve always been interested in technology. I admired technology at least since watching early space age TV. I watched Fireball XL-5, Supercar, and the old Thunderbirds with the puppets that were held up by strings. In those days computers were devices used only by banks and military or government agencies.
At around aged 17 after completing three ‘A’ level exams there was an opportunity to work with Oxford Universities’ computer. We coded a simple prime number discovery program using a language called ‘ALGOL’ and fed it in by punched card. It worked!
When the first home ‘micro’s came out it didn’t take me long to obtain one. Mine was called a ‘PET’ and had 32k RAM and a cassette tape so I could store a program when I turned the power off. I copied and made up code using ‘BASIC’, a language that is as it is described ie basic.
So years later when I was working for a marketing agency and someone said “who knows anything about computers?” up went my hand.
I then managed what seemed like an interminable amount of data entry that was validated by keying it in twice.
I hacked the print production code so we could print specialised reports for customers from our database of surveys. I used to string jobs together under one command to set them all going, and once going I had little to do. It is not true that I once wrote a command called ‘Monday’ to avoid work.
In order to see whether or not the new payroll system was secure, I was asked to break into it and managed that in one evening. I enjoyed discovering that the boss had two payroll entries, and seeing how much he was paying himself – and what other colleagues were getting.
I learned to use ‘4th Dimension’ or ‘4D’ which is a relational database management system for the Apple Mac. I was UK software support for 4D for a while. I would not consider a support request to be closed until the customer had specifically agreed that the issue was resolved. There was never a chance that a customer had been left partially satisfied.
I made many small databases for clients using 4D. I then learned systems analysis methods in order to design a multi user fleet management database. I also saved a number of corporate clients a great deal by helping their IT departments to code their direct marketing databases in house.
When the worldwide web became available in the early 90’s I quickly learned to use the hypertext markup language (html) and typed it by hand to make my own websites. I had some code written for me in Perl that I later hacked to make responsive website pages or whole sites.
When I wanted to persuade my ISP to upgrade my website security I wrote a set of scripts which enabled the user to see information (published or not) from any other customer site on the same server. Once they had some choice urls the server upgrade came really fast.
I had thought that I wasn’t too bad at teaching myself new programming languages so I had a go at creating a word reader using Java. Although it took a long time to make, and my code is not elegant, it works almost as planned. ‘Wordstreamer’ can save loads of reading time on a long text.
More recently I enjoyed putting together a 4 dimensional noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) game using PHP that could be played against a web server. PHP is a tolerant language that doesn’t need compiling or the declaring of variables, so I get along well with it. ‘4D tic tac toe‘ is good for the brain. Do have a go.
I should mention that I was unqualified to do any of the above.