The longer story.

I started writing code in 1982 — on home computers that came with manuals you actually read. Forty-plus years on, I still spend most of my evenings doing it.

Professionally, I've been at it since 2001. Before that came retail — selling computers in a store, then in a warehouse, then to resellers — and tech support for networking and peripherals. Useful schooling for someone who'd later spend years on the unglamorous side of software.

From there: my own small business writing CRM and CMS software, second-line support for an ecommerce platform, full-stack ecommerce work, a stretch as a backend developer in financial systems, and now backend work on an ecommerce platform again.

The languages I reach for change with the problem. PHP and Perl most of all, with JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Pascal, Delphi, C, C++, and a long list of others when they're the right tool for the job.

The tools and libraries on the Repositories page are evenings and weekends — small things I wanted to exist. More will appear there as I sort the back catalogue.