Essentially I love solving problems - hopefully they're programming related, complex or educational; when I'm lucky they are all three! I trained as a programmer and after a long time climbing the managerial ladder in Further and Higher Education have made the transition to that career, specializing in PHP development primarily and (mostly these days) with the Laravel framework, MySQL, Ajax and JavaScript. My first love will always be C++ though and I'm generally at home in Windows or Linux environments and am Cisco-trained.Somehow I've managed to fit in some authoring (mainly with my wife) and I think we've both entered double digits by now. Historically, I've been Head of Computing (a Centre of Vocational Excellence for IT Services) at Gloucestershire College and had many happy years there, working with many wonderful colleagues and students (many who I am happy to run into in my travels and discover what they are up to these days - often brilliant, shiny new things).I've also designed curriculum and L2 and L3 programmes of IT study for various large awarding bodies and am particularly proud of the L3 Cyber Security Technical created for AQA in 2015 which had some great endorsements and feedback from some of the biggest names in the industry.Most recently I've spent time in full stack development (yes, it clearly still exists...), meeting a wonderful group of skillful programmers along the way, and in 2018 moved back into education at QA, where I've moved from one exciting and rewarding role to another, currently enjoying a new challenge as Technical Director in its Talent Division, finding myself once again trying to get young people into the IT industry, just not doing as much hands-on teaching as I once did...Of course, still hoping to write that novel one day though..!