A passionate developer with 40 years experience, currently specialising in mobile development.

• I’m an experienced full-spectrum developer with 38 years IT experience, 11 years of which has been spent developing iOS applications and SDKs. IT excites me as much now as it did when I was 9 and it’s been a privilege to earn a living with a (CS/AI degree-backed!) hobby.

• Prior to focussing on iOS I gained broad background experience in sys admin, backend web and native desktop application development across a variety of domains.

• I’ve worked in both large, regulated, companies and small startup teams. I understand when you have to cut corners to ship and when that’s simply not an option. I try and apply pragmatism, Occam’s razor and forward planning to reduce the occasions when corner cutting is necessarily an option. Glaxo, Airbus, Dyson, Amiosec, all offered differing degrees of siloing; you have to work with (and within) the system, whatever that is.

• I want to leave any codebase better than when I found it. I comment code, write in-repo onboarding documentation, plead for continuous integration and write code in a testable way. I try and avoid premature optimisation, instead refactoring code the second or third time it seems that I should.

• I have a good understanding of common design patterns, and UML, know when not to make a religion out of a methodology (looking at you, Agile) and retain enough flexibility to suggest maybe-stupid out-of-the-box when my hunch is the existing solutions won’t work. I’m also not afraid to try something, fail early and move on. It’s best to have a Plan B before embarking on Plan A.

• I’m naturally curious; I’ll try and learn a new language annually (this year is revisiting modern web development with Typescript and associated tooling). I also know I can’t know it all; my learning is necessarily on-demand and occasionally even only skin-deep. And that’s OK.

• I find my architectures are naturally declarative and decoupled; I’ve been writing things in a Functional SOA style before I really knew that was a thing.

• I’ve taken several apps from green-field through to App Store deployment, including setting up backend services, implementing crash reporting and mobile analytics and a variety of beta deployment services. The last 10% may not be the most glamorous but they might just be the most valuable. The earlier points about planning, design, CI etc. can make the delivery a lot less painful.

• I said IT was a hobby; in my spare time I build robots (quad walkers, Rubik's Cube solvers, pneumatic switch), maintain vintage computers, 3D print (and develop software to help with that) and learn new languages and frameworks just because they look interesting.