How It All Started
I've been fascinated by mechanics, electricity and photography since I was tiny. I helped my dad rewire our house when I was 8 (I was the only one that would fit under the floorboards to run the cables!). The brakes failed on our family car while we were away in Devon on holiday when I was about 10, so while everyone else was out enjoying themselves at the beach, Dad & I replaced the leaking slave cylinder, bled the brakes and got the car back on the road. I spent many hours with Dad at his workbench, serving my early apprenticeship building, servicing and repairing bicycles and keeping the family car going.
I grew up with professional photographers in the family, so was always around cameras. I've carried a camera with me most of the time since before I was 10 and later took photography at college.
I saw my first home computer when I was 12 and instantly knew what I wanted for the following Christmas (we were blessed with a Commodore Vic 20 that my brother and I spent many hours playing on, struggling with and fighting over!).
I was brought up to be frugal, mindful of waste and to maximise available resources.
From local Hologram Manufacture to America
Following working in a metallurgy lab in my hometown, I started working in the hologram industry in the late 80s. In the mid 90s I was offered a job in Texas, USA at a company that designed and built computer controlled hologram mastering machines. It was a small company, which meant that I needed to be able to do pretty much everything there. I was operating the custom machine control software, creating content with Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere software, building the machines from scratch and flying around the world to install and service them as well as train customers on how to use them.
Discovering The World Wide Web
Whilst working at this company, in January 1995 I finally got to access the internet. I was left in front of the blinking cursor of a search engine by one of the bosses after he'd taken me back to the office late at night after picking me up from the airport. I had jet-lag and didn't feel tired, so spent the next 8 or so hours searching for subjects that interested me and was amazed at the wealth of information available. This was a whole new world that I knew that I wanted to get involved in. There was an old 386 PC computer kicking around the office which I was allowed to borrow and take home. Over the next couple of months I spent the evenings teaching myself how to make websites. This wasn't too complicated at the time- websites were mostly text based, all text and images could only be left aligned and there was no way to modify any of the page layout. At this time I started to build myself a website of my favourite hobbies, which were old records and 60s Volkswagens.
I showed this to my boss and he was keen for me to put something together for the company. A week or so later he'd bought a server, installed it in a local service provider and we had the beginnings of a website live to the world! We got the author's permission to publish a beginner's guide to holography that the boss had found helpful when starting out. His partner typed up the text from it and I added all of the HTML around the text to ensure that it was organised and displayed correctly.
For my troubles, I was given some server space on which to host my own website. This went on to attract the attention of music and classic VW lovers around the world!
The business's website was developing, split between the educational side of how to make holograms and the promotion of the hologram mastering systems that we were making. One of the key customers was in Mexico City- Hologramas de México, which had some lucrative government security contracts. On the strength of the two websites that I'd built, I was asked to build a website for them, and was flown out to their offices to train some staff members on how to update and expand the website themselves.
This lead to further work building websites locally and throughout the hologram industry in the United States, and included the production of a CD-ROM that a Pennsylvania based hologram printer sent out to potential customers.
Back to England
After 3 productive and eventful years in America, it was time to move back home. By this time the size of the hologram industry was contracting (too much backstabbing, gatekeeping and misinformation, the polar opposite of what I was experiencing online) and I could see that it was time to move my focus to websites. The UK populous was still some way behind America's with its use of the internet, so it made sense to get in and capitalise on my head start.
Things had been moving lightning-fast with the development of online technologies and what was possible with a website. When I got back to the UK, I spent some time immersing myself in the latest functionality and possibilities. I built a personal showcase site and sent the link off to some agencies.
The next day I was offered an interview at the fledgling New Media Department of a large international corporate computer software and hardware company. I was given the job as a front end developer and was immediately working for some high-end clients such as The BBC, Church's Shoes, Bentley Motors, Kingfisher Group, The Football Association and many other household names.
The highlight of my time there was to work on the world's first shop that was available through a games console- the Sega Dreamcast. I hand coded all of the layouts and created the graphics, starting with English and then adding further European languages (German, in particular, proved to be very challenging- they have some very long words that meant the buttons and interface had to be redesigned around them).
After 18 months in the corporate world, I'd had enough. The final straw was when my team was sent to the North of England for a team building exercise just days before the deadline of an important project. Instead of getting the job finished, we spent two days bowling and wasting time, causing the project to be late and .
Self Employment
For the next ten years I worked as a self-employed web developer, mostly on websites of my own clients, but also working with other graphic designers and web developers. I purchased my own servers which were housed in London's Docklands and things ran well.
Too Much Screens
Around the end of the 2000s, I started suffering with RSI in my hands and wrists- just too much time spent on computers. After the physiotherapist was unable to help in any meaningful way, I was told that I needed to stop spend less time in front of a computer and allow my hands and wrists to recover.
I found a local company that was designing and building solar powered battery systems that