Shawson's Code Blog

are you local?

I’m a developer based in West Sussex, living right in the middle of nowhere!  At the moment I’m a full time senior web developer for Hachette UK.  I’m also a part time IPhone Objective C developer working with Flexicoder on some 3D OpenGL games.

My career so far…

It all started around 1999 while still at college doing a BTEC National Diploma in Computer Studies when I got offered a job with FreshEgg as a web designer, based on some free lance jobs I had done for a few friends.  It soon became apparent I was not cut out for design, and I moved to my true calling, and what I was studying for at college, programming. As the part time (one day a week!) junior in a small dev team, I spent most of my time debugging, which taught me a tremendous amount and put me in good footing for when I finished college and graduated with a First in my BSc Computing with Internet Technologies (hons) degree, to work as a full time developer.

I worked on a whole host of MS SQL driven, classic ASP e-commerce websites, complete with custom built content management areas as well as the occasional intranet.  The projects were always carried out with quite tight co-ordination between the Dev, Design and SEO teams, and usually under quite tight time restraints.  I was also the only full time developer to have any experience with PHP, so any PHP/MySQL sites we got in to maintain were given to me.  I also did some work liaising with Amazon and DealTime’s technical teams to produce various data feeds (using DTS and ASP pages to generate CSV’s) allowing our clients to syndicate their product data via other channels.  Fresh Egg has their own dedicated SEO team which we worked with quite closely on a number of projects, which was a really great learning experience.

After three years I made the move to Hachette, where I was employed by a former colleague from FreshEgg who had moved to Hachette a year earlier.  My job here also entailed building e-commerce websites, but now in asp.net using vb and c# using n-tier architecture.  I also setup a few sharepoint installations (which was a joy(!)) I’m also responsible for a set of c# web services which expose Hachette’s legacy back office systems to the internet, enabling e-commerce websites to log orders directly with the distributors in real time.  This facet of my job involves offering lots of support to third party developers looking to integrate with the services, and working with the developers of the back office system itself to expand and improve the services going forward.  After two years I was promoted to Senior Web Developer.  I’ve most recently just finished overhauling our error reporting system with a single central WCF service based system, sitting on top of a data layer powered by Entity Framework.  We also recently begun looking into off the shelf CMS packages, with my most recent project being built using Umbraco.

When I’m not at work..

At present all of my spare time is being consumed with a personal project myself and a friend are working in Objective C on the iPhone.  We’re working on a 3D OpenGL powered game, which we hope to have out at the start of the new year- this has been a tremendous learning curve as neither of us have touched OpenGL before, or made any games!

I actually spend quite a chunk of my free time doing development related stuff- I believe that to be successful in this industry you have to have a genuine interest in it, as everything move so quickly, you have so many cool new technologies springing up almost over night, that if you weren’t interested you would very soon fall behind.  As a result I often spend a few of my evenings during the week trying out new technologies, tinkering with various web projects I have on the go and messing about with stuff.

When I’m not working or online gaming I go to the cinema – a lot – thanks to the Cineworld unlimited cards my friends and I have,  I also play airsoft for a Sussex based team at Combat South down in Portsmouth every month or so.  I play guitar (ish) and have recently started to learn the piano, which is actually a lot harder than I thought it looked… We also conveniently live within a 60 second walk from one of the two village pubs