James Whinfrey

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve an urge to launch into a sales pitch tainted by the kind of spin I used when writing anything for DTI consumption: they really like that kind of thing. I’ll fight the urge and hopefully you’ll get a piece of the real me.

The fact is that my previous life as a Principal Engineer in a multi-national company didn’t work out for me. I got involved in several interesting projects and learned a great deal, and for those opportunities I’ll always be grateful to my old employer. But it turns out that I’m just not suited to corporate life, a fact that took 9 years to catch up with me. So I left to do my own thing without any clear idea of what that thing was.

I’d always been interested in computing and programming, starting on a BBC model ‘A’ in BASIC through to UNIX systems in my old job. But with no formal computing education my attention was drawn to Web development. It lacked the complexity of full fat software engineering at the time, making it much more accessible.

Once in the computing community I realised that there’s far more to learn than my ‘BASIC’ experience led me to believe. That complexity started to seem attractive, and I embarked on a Diploma in Computing with the Open University to provide a foundation.

And my life is still focused on computing now. I build websites and applications for clients, manage my own web servers, and I’m starting to launch my own products. I started in developing PHP, but have moved to Ruby and Java where possible; afraid I don’t love PHP anymore, if I ever did.

But frankly I’m a restless person, and there’s an inexhaustible supply of fascinating subjects to learn about and problems to be solved. So my focus at the moment—it will change—may be summarised in this blog… but not always.

So here’s the pitch. I’ve a track record as a problem solver, I love learning new tricks and you may have just the problem to catch my imagination. But we’ll never know unless you get in touch.