My CV in my own words
My fascination with IT started in the '90s when I discovered I could hack into a text file on the DOS-based Tetris game and manually change the score.
For a couple of days, my unfathomable high scores drove my opponents crazy. The buzz of "yes, it worked!" never left me to this day. Overcoming technical challenges became my reason to get up from bed in the morning.
The next challenge that awaited me was a client-server IBM hotel check-in and reporting software in the Sicilian tourist village Kastalia. I was employed as the Head of Reception with the daily responsibility to close the operations and print financial and HR summaries. Buggy software and jamming dot-matrix printers meant the hotel's IT manager and my mentor Tony would often curse his ringing phone in the middle of the night.
Desktop publishing and CMYK colour separations were daily grinds during the mid-nineties when I worked for the Austrian magazine "14 Days". I would digitize text and photos and layout the newspaper using Adobe Page Maker. An agency would produce CMYK colour separations and ship them on a dozen 1.44Mb floppy discs by courier to printers in Venice.
My first internet access was a 14.4 kilobits per second modem, using the AOL browser. A friend from England sent me Ben Forta's ColdFusion books. HTML, ColdFusion and SqlServer became the next challenge to overcome. I made websites for retailers and political campaigns throughout the second half of the nineties.
In 1998 I moved to England to become an IT contractor. My first job was with Foundation Network in Oxford, developing Relay, a CRM system used by SONY, and Hardware Parts Exchange System for 3Com. CSS became a force for webpage design while the browser wars between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator raged on. We struggled with browser incompatibilities and the early incarnations of JavaScript, helped by Yahoo searches. 3Com project lead from Austria sent an email praising my Parts Exchange System as the best software he ever used.
I moved on to become the head of development of Prime Location, one of the first-ever property portals in the UK. We had to integrate data from two hundred founding estate agents into a single database. As Yahoo searches turned to Googling, I set up the development team and used an early incarnation of agile project management to deliver the online application in eight months.
Next, I accepted an offer to develop Bettercaring, a care homes portal. OLM Group acquired Bettercaring, and they offered me my next development job: CareKnowledge, a CMS platform based on ColdFusion, Flash and ActionScript. As internet speeds increased, I started collaborating with freelance developers across the globe, forming remote teams and perfecting my grip on agile project management to deliver complex projects against tight deadlines and ever-changing clients' requirements.
It dawned on me that every time I got a new development job, I had to do the same "plumbing" as a part of the set-up. An idea started germinating: what if we developed an object-oriented CMS platform that would enable us to jump-start projects and deliver them faster and cheaper? I struggled with a name for the platform until my wife came up with Webpuzzle.
The Mirror Group acquired Prime Location. One of the original investors liked the idea of Webpuzzle. He put together a group of investors, I formed a remote development team, and we founded the company in 2005. The object-oriented concept and recursive processing demanded scalable development environments. We used JAVA, DHTML, AJAX, SqlServer and later MySQL.
William Reed Business Media uses Webpuzzle to power their flagship businesses: World's 50 Best Restaurants and International Wine Challenge. They can rapidly expand their offerings as trial and error come cheap. The successful concepts are quickly packaged and delivered. My remote team of developers supports portals, business applications, and cloud hosting at Rackspace UK.
In 2017, as the technical lead at Lloyds, I enabled the delivery of complex customer-facing forms on two proprietary frameworks with a highly aggressive timeline (35 new digital products delivered in 16 months). I coordinated the transition and knowledge transfer between two outsourcing companies and designed and developed mission-critical parts of the Web API platform.
My latest product, Webpuzzle Studio - "the pandemic special", is aimed at the volume market. I used the inevitable downtime during various lockdowns to develop an idea that hibernated in my mind for years. Running on React, Spring Boot web services and MySql, it incorporates a decade of experience in digital publishing under a straightforward user interface.
The next challenge that awaited me was a client-server IBM hotel check-in and reporting software in the Sicilian tourist village Kastalia. I was employed as the Head of Reception with the daily responsibility to close the operations and print financial and HR summaries. Buggy software and jamming dot-matrix printers meant the hotel's IT manager and my mentor Tony would often curse his ringing phone in the middle of the night.
Desktop publishing and CMYK colour separations were daily grinds during the mid-nineties when I worked for the Austrian magazine "14 Days". I would digitize text and photos and layout the newspaper using Adobe Page Maker. An agency would produce CMYK colour separations and ship them on a dozen 1.44Mb floppy discs by courier to printers in Venice.
My first internet access was a 14.4 kilobits per second modem, using the AOL browser. A friend from England sent me Ben Forta's ColdFusion books. HTML, ColdFusion and SqlServer became the next challenge to overcome. I made websites for retailers and political campaigns throughout the second half of the nineties.
In 1998 I moved to England to become an IT contractor. My first job was with Foundation Network in Oxford, developing Relay, a CRM system used by SONY, and Hardware Parts Exchange System for 3Com. CSS became a force for webpage design while the browser wars between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator raged on. We struggled with browser incompatibilities and the early incarnations of JavaScript, helped by Yahoo searches. 3Com project lead from Austria sent an email praising my Parts Exchange System as the best software he ever used.
I moved on to become the head of development of Prime Location, one of the first-ever property portals in the UK. We had to integrate data from two hundred founding estate agents into a single database. As Yahoo searches turned to Googling, I set up the development team and used an early incarnation of agile project management to deliver the online application in eight months.
Next, I accepted an offer to develop Bettercaring, a care homes portal. OLM Group acquired Bettercaring, and they offered me my next development job: CareKnowledge, a CMS platform based on ColdFusion, Flash and ActionScript. As internet speeds increased, I started collaborating with freelance developers across the globe, forming remote teams and perfecting my grip on agile project management to deliver complex projects against tight deadlines and ever-changing clients' requirements.
It dawned on me that every time I got a new development job, I had to do the same "plumbing" as a part of the set-up. An idea started germinating: what if we developed an object-oriented CMS platform that would enable us to jump-start projects and deliver them faster and cheaper? I struggled with a name for the platform until my wife came up with Webpuzzle.
The Mirror Group acquired Prime Location. One of the original investors liked the idea of Webpuzzle. He put together a group of investors, I formed a remote development team, and we founded the company in 2005. The object-oriented concept and recursive processing demanded scalable development environments. We used JAVA, DHTML, AJAX, SqlServer and later MySQL.
William Reed Business Media uses Webpuzzle to power their flagship businesses: World's 50 Best Restaurants and International Wine Challenge. They can rapidly expand their offerings as trial and error come cheap. The successful concepts are quickly packaged and delivered. My remote team of developers supports portals, business applications, and cloud hosting at Rackspace UK.
In 2017, as the technical lead at Lloyds, I enabled the delivery of complex customer-facing forms on two proprietary frameworks with a highly aggressive timeline (35 new digital products delivered in 16 months). I coordinated the transition and knowledge transfer between two outsourcing companies and designed and developed mission-critical parts of the Web API platform.
My latest product, Webpuzzle Studio - "the pandemic special", is aimed at the volume market. I used the inevitable downtime during various lockdowns to develop an idea that hibernated in my mind for years. Running on React, Spring Boot web services and MySql, it incorporates a decade of experience in digital publishing under a straightforward user interface.
