Where It All Started

I started ‘Programming’ at a young age when my dad gave me a Commodore ‘plus 4’ to play with. Every week my nana bought me magazines which came with ‘source code’ which you could type in and run and a game would appear. I’ll be honest it wasn’t quite programming as such but it gave me such a buzz when I was able to ‘tell the computer what to do’ and this pretty much was the first thing which got me interested in programming.

Dracula, The Game Changer

The first time a game truly impressed me was the game Dracula on the Commodore 64 which was a text based adventure where you had to hunt down and slay Dracula. To progress through the game you needed to get some holy water from a priest, who wanted to sell you the water for 10 gold. All I had on my character at the time was a knife and no gold, So instead of giving him some gold I decided to try and stab the priest and just steal the water. To my surprise it worked and I carried on with the game but in my mind I was amazed that I could have so much choice in a game and this experience pretty much shaped the rest of my life regarding both programming and gaming.

Post Education (Sixth Form)

Throughout my school and college life I knew I always wanted to be a programmer and spent a lot of time planning out game ideas for text adventures and small RPGs. Once I left college I didn’t really know where to go next but luckily got offered a job at my local school to be trained as a ICT Technician which involved me getting certified in both Cisco and Microsoft products.

About a year and a half past and I was finding the job quite boring and the lack of challenge was really starting to frustrate me as there wasn’t a great deal of technical issues to solve and the majority of time was spent sorting out printers, scanners and attempting to get some of the oldest computers in the known universe to try and run up to date software. It was at this time when I decided I need something to change and began to research into getting into the digital industry. The following month I quit my job at the school and enrolled at Teesside University on their games programming course.

Post Education (University)

My time at university was an amazing experience, I enjoyed every moment of it and made some great friends during my time there. I also took part in a few coding competitions such as Microsoft’s X48 while there in which my team came in 2nd and 3rd place (Won a secondary prize for ‘Most Technical Project’).

After Three years, a couple of thousand lines of code and a bit of debt I came out of university with a degree and was ready to become a professional programmer. It was at this point which I needed to decide which way I wanted take my life, should I apply for a job, should I try freelancing or maybe something else? I decided to go down the ‘something else’ route and created my own company called Big Bear Studios which can be read about in the companies section of the website.

While at Big Bear Studios I worked as a Managing Director and the Technical Lead, I secured various contracts and also created the game engine which we used throughout all of our iOS projects called ‘Bear 2D’. Unfortunately in January of 2010 we had issues with two clients not paying and could no longer afford to keep the company running. This was a pretty tricky time but lucky all of the team fell on their feet and three of the members which included myself got hired by a local mobile developer called Fluid Pixel to work on iOS games. During my time at fluid pixel I worked on over 10 games and applications for the iOS platform and specialised in building generic frameworks which aided the development process.

Freelance

A year and a half passed and the projects at Fluid Pixel were starting to become a little stale, it was at this point that I decided to take the plunge into freelancing under the trading name of ‘Zen Development’ and ended up working for some pretty big clients around the UK such as the NHS, Hilton Hotel Group and Starwood Hotel Group. This was probably the most enjoyable time I’ve ever had as a programmer as I was working on a different project every couple of months, got to work with some cutting edge technology on iOS, Android and Windows Mobile platforms and enjoyed every project which I undertook.

Back to Employment

Unfortunately all good things must come to an end and my partner at the time didn’t appreciate the long hours I was working and the travelling I was doing from one end of the country to the other on a weekly basis, so in September of 2012 I took a full-time job at Audacious where I became head of their mobile development team. Audacious were a social media company attempting to bring Christianity to the masses via the web. My time at Audacious was spent working on their Bible reader application on both iOS and Android but unfortunately Audacious closed down in January 2014 due to lack of funding.

Out of The Frying Pan and Into The Fire

Straight out of the door from Audacious myself and Kerry both got a job at Blooie working on their chat platform which aimed to bring ‘offline sales tactics’ to online businesses. I was employed as a ‘developer’ which included writing backend development calls using node.js and frontend development using Ember.js.

Unfortunately as a huge number of startups often do, Blooie went into administration in February 2015 and had to let all of its staff go.

To be continued…