This is a place where I dump code and techniques I’ve discovered while building internet and mobile applications.
Yes, that makes it just like a million other code blogs.
No, I don’t particularly care.
Yes, you can have an ice cream if you behave well.
No, there will not be a test.
I started out as a lowly internet service provider email tech support responder in Melbourne, Australia. Moved up to managing the entire email support system and how we handled responses. Built a small Campaign Management System, used it a bit. Moved to the Bay Area (That’s in California, not just around Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay) with the company as we rode on the dot com wave.
Came back 6 weeks later as the dot com wave crashed on the beach of reality.
Started with a small business solutions company servicing some pretty large companies, and stayed with them for the almost-unheard-of-amount-of-time-these-days-in-the-tech-world of 13 years. Initially using campaign management systems like Chordiant and Unica, and reporting solutions like Business Objects, but then getting into more nitty gritty database coding, and simple web front ends. Then into more complicated web front ends using Javascript and PHP.
Then realised that HTML was pretty annoying to get working consistently across all browsers/OS’s so moved to Flash as a runtime. First using OpenLaszlo and Java to build products like an award winning Small Business Solution called ANZ Business Insights, but then moved onto Flex itself, talking to Java and connecting to Postgresql and Greenplum databases to create web based applications for intra-company and wider use, and also the exact same stack to create mobile applications to run primarily on tablet devices.
Then people started to not like Flash very much, even Adobe seemed to think it was best left to die, and HTML had come along in leaps and bounds, and it seemed like a good time to come crawling back to the land of no plugins. Rebuilt our Flex based data visualization application in the space of a few months using Angular.
Moved to a new company as their Web Architect, tasked with bringing their 30+ year old text based products into the world of the web, bringing my knowledge of building applications in a number of technologies, and looking to instill some damn good practices in this space.
Now I lead a team who develop an awesome piece of the HROnboard toolkit, called Welcomes. It’s a nice tech stack of Node and Typescript and React.
And I brought an espresso machine.
spoco.info is my sporadically updated resume