I started full-time work in 1990 at SD-Scicon in Milton Keynes as a junior programmer developing systems in FORTRAN (which I had learnt at university). Following the acquistion of SD-Scicon by EDS and their decision to sell the industry business to a Dutch company, I ended up working at a small subsidary and after four years decided to look for a new challenge.
The new challenge came at Logica, which had been a competitor of SD-Scicon for many years. FORTRAN was being used in their space business at the time, although I soon discovered that C was used more and managed to teach myself on the job enough to be considered a C developer.
When my wife and I decided to start a family, we took the decision that it would not be in London. This led to me becoming the NSPIS Interfaces Development Manager at Securicor Information Systems where my team was responsible for the interfaces between the police systems being developed by Securicor and all the systems they need to exchange data with. The specification for XML had only been published a couple of months earlier but we recognised that it had potential, however we had to develop our own XML processor.
After three years I was looking for a new opportunity and it came with the acquisition of Admiral by CMG and I joined the week after the merged company was created in the telecommunications business in 2001. Since then the company has been acquired by Logica who in turn was acquired by CGI where I have worked on projects for fixed line operators, mobile operators as well as working on enterprise social networking solutions.
Having spent my early teens in Germany, my family returned to England in order for me to have a sixth form education in an English school and take my A-levels, which I did at Runshaw College in Leyland. From there I went to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology to study Pure Mathematics and Language Studies from where I gratuated with a BSc(Hons) degree in 1990.
Last updated: Thu 30 March 2023