This blog
I started this blog as I'm by nature an extroverted programmer. I love to talk through the problems I'm facing with my colleagues and developer friends and it helps me out a lot. This blog is my attempt to recreate that approach for the development that I do for myself.
The other reason that I started this blog was that so I could check out ruby and the rails framework! As I progress with the blog I'll post info on my impressions.
All the coding and design on the site is done by me, which is why it's gray and drab! I'll flash it up as I go. I will never test this blog in IE6 or IE7, so if it looks crap in those... I don't really care :P!
Me
I'm Andrew Barrett, I live in London, United Kingdom with my wife and a few persistent mice. I'm Scottish by birth, a New Zealander by way of my dad, and more or less international by upbringing. Programming aside I love playing basketball, watching rugby, playing computer games, reading sci-fi books and basically all the stereotypical geeky pursuits.
Apart from a stint of basic programming when I was a kid, I didn't really get exposed to software until I hit uni. After being massively bored with doing the work experience after the first year of an electrical engineering degree, I switched to computer science and never looked back. Well it's fairer to say that I only really started programming when I was in my honours year, before that I only turned up to uni for exams and spent the rest of the time playing games and drinking beer. I graduated with a BSc Hons (First class) in COSC from Canterbury University in 2002.
My honours work was all human computer interaction stuff, but then an embedded C company hired my entire honours year, so I became an embedded C programmer and remained so for 6 years. Working so close to the machine I kinda felt apart from the software community for a while. I've always been in love with software though, and now more than ever that I'm working back up the stack.
I'm currently a software contractor, working in London. My company website can be found (soon) here. Currently I'm mainly working as .NET developer, working on ASP.NET websites and WinForms applications. But longer term I want to be working on my own software, making money from that.