I am a 32 year old computery techie kind of person. I live in Birmingham with my wife Chris and baby Nathan, and currently work as an ASP.NET programmer, although I've done a few different things in the past and fully expect to do so again in the future. I've written a couple of books about computer programming, though that was a while ago now.

I grew up in Dorset, where my parents still live, and went to university in Birmingham and Aberystwyth, where I spent time studying German, Maths and International Politics (though not necessarily simultaneously). I also spent time writing, performing and producing comedy sketch shows for stage and radio, writing and laying out student magazines, helping set up Aberystwyth's student radio station, Bay Radio, and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep out of student union politics.

After leaving Uni I got a job with Wrox Press; at the time, the fastest growing player in the computer publishing market, and a fantastic place to work. I had a fairly techie background, although I tried to suppress it - I've always had computers around me, ever since my Dad built a ZX81 from a kit, and the family got its first Mac in around 1987. So, I've been hacking around with computers for a long time, but my most serious programming had been done in Atari ST STOS basic and AppleScript.

At Wrox, I was thrown in at the deep end with server-side Java programming, and discovered object-orientation properly - finding out that there were languages that had features built in to let me do the things I had been trying to do with AppleScript was a joy. Subsequently I got to work in PHP, Perl, VB and VBScript, all the while with a firm home base in Java, before Microsoft launched .NET, and I began porting my Java knowledge over to C#.

Along the way, Wrox let me write a couple of books of my own, as well as contributing content to a few others, and commissioning and editing many more.

I left Wrox under my own steam, before the company's financial problems led to their being bought by Wiley. I worked freelance for a time, writing, developing, and so on, before getting myself a few long term contracts that led to a permanent gig as development lead for a software company. That journey leads me to my current place as a .NET programmer trying to solve tricky problems in web development frameworks, rich web user interfaces, code generation, development process management, and test automation.

I'm an avid consumer of modern fiction, imported US television, and cheesy action movies.