My first website went on-line in 1999 (and that was the proudest day of my life). Since that auspicious date, I have had ample opportunity to build stuff, bang my head against digital walls, throw it away and start again. Along the way, I’ve gained a few insights into *what not to do*, if you want to deliver a stable, secure and functioning web application (figuring out the *what to do* is still an ongoing process).
Firmly established in front end development, my early years were spent in the trenches of the browser cross-compatibility wars and meeting the challenge of making a browser do stuff it most definitely wasn’t designed for at the time. Having finally gotten over framesets and table layouts, experiencing the JavaScript development curve from disjointed jQuery scripts to beautifully structured applications was quite a ride. Then Node.was rolled out and a whole new world opened – issues which were previously comfortably ignored needed to be resolved. Suddenly session management, data storage and API versioning could no longer be taken for granted.
Fast forward to today, being responsible for a product that is predominantly a collection of back end processes and API endpoints, my focus has shifted to finding straight-forward solutions for complex problems. I enjoy finding the balance between using the best tool for a problem and suddenly maintaining a toolbox of exotic gizmos. My relationship to API implementation and maintenance has on occasion been referred to as obsessive.
Why I 
Tech
“The instant gratification of building something – coupled with the excitements of a constantly evolving landscape (I get bored easily).
My personal tech/IT-trend 2017
“Microservices (although “Drinking White Russians, while zombie fridges bots are bringing down the internet” came a close second)