I got my first taste of writing code many, many years ago when I was at school. My parents bought me a Commodore 64 and I've been programming ever since.

I spent the early part of my professional programming career moving between COBOL and different flavours of 4GL, all in Unix environments of one sort or another.

My first job was as a COBOL programmer writing financial analysis software for a manufacturing company. I then moved on to my first experience with 4GL's using a language called ALL (Application Language Liberator) developed by McDonnell Douglas Information Systems Limited. It was a variant of the more widely known PROIV.

I did this for a number of years before moving back into a COBOL job, this time in the retail industry. This involved writing financial analysis and back office systems along with EPOS software.

I then began my second stint with 4GL's using Cognos Inc's Powerhouse. I worked in a software house writing student administration systems for customers in the further and higher education marketplace.

It was at this point I started to become a little bored with mainframe development and decided I wanted to move into web development and work with the Microsoft stack. I started to teach myself C#, ASP.Net, HTML, CSS and SQLServer.

After a short while I managed to secure my first c# role with a major financial institution working in retail banking. I worked in their middle tier team building web services with C# and WCF.

After leaving the bank I spent a short time working freelance with C#, ASP.Net, HTML and CSS. I then moved back into financial services, again working in middle tier development, writing web services and class libraries. After that I spent a brief spell working in the gambling industry.