2010
I trade under the name 'GHIJK' for the first time, aiming to help small businesses and non-profits with their web projects.
The story
Firstly, the company name. It's Scottish Gaelic and translated/pronounced it reads geek. It's usually one of the first questions I get asked by people.️
I started the business in 2010 while still employed in local government with the aim of helping small businesses and non-profits circumnavigate building their websites.
I moved on from local government in early 2011 working with a local software house before going full-time with GHIJK later that year.
Not much has changed in the time since. Relationships with customers, employees, vendors, peers, tools and technologies have come and gone — some have stayed — but my aims remain the same
to provide customers with respect, honest & transparent technology advice and code.
Some milestones over the years
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2011
- engaged by Twin Technologies (now Intevity) to work onsite with Under Armour in Baltimore - building the front end of their V5 commerce platform
- incorporated with Companies House in Scotland
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2013
Engaged by MPL Communications - the production company for Sir Paul McCartney - to deliver the first mobile friendly experience of paulmccartney.com on the Drupal platform.
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2014
- take on the management of web properties for The Gospel Coalition
- David joins as employee #1 in Spring
- our first garden office is installed
- Jamie joins as employee #2 in Autumn
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2015
- as both team members move on to pastures new, I decide that being a 'company of 1' is preferable
- help Cigna Health build a responsive website for cignaglobal.com
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2016
I'm engaged by Prudential Assurance to help their team deliver a front end for pruadviser.co.uk
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2017
- help Disney Circle replatform meetcircle.com to Statamic CMS
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2018
- get involved with a local startup building a CRM suite with my specific focus being the JavaScript chat widget
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2019
- launch the first of my SaaS platforms; Chariot - a ride-sharing platform for churches
- become one of the first verified Statamic CMS partners
- launch Purku - an automated transcription service
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2020
- I think I can safely speak for everyone here when I say 😩
A biography
“We'll never have the Internet in this house”
These immortal words were spoken by my dad (a software developer by the way) sometime in the mid-90s. He's never explained his reasoning to me 🤷🏻♂️.
Nevertheless, he gave in when he decided he wanted to sell his Charles Rennie Mackintosh font online.
Between the 2 of us, we hacked wrote beautiful html code that would allow
someone to pay for their digital download with a system called Payloadz.
I left high school at 15 to pursue a college diploma in Information Technology. It was dull, really dull. The problem was the course modules were predominantly hardware based. It was useful certainly but not what I wanted to be doing. I eventually found some joy in 2 modules of web scripting and database normalisation (who knew?).
That diploma was largely a waste of time but it matured me because of my interactions with considerably more 'life experienced' fellows.
Even although I was continuing to self-teach, I eventually found my path:
- HNC Web Development at James Watt College
- BSc in Multimedia Systems at Paisley University
- Web Developer at Evolution Life Science
- Web Developer at Royal Bank of Scotland
- Web Developer at South Lanarkshire Council
- Web Developer at a local software house
It started with a kiss conversation. Let's arrange a call to
talk about your project. If you like what you read here, there's a great chance we could be a good fit. If it's something I don't do, I'll likely know someone who does.