2010
I trade under the name 'GHIJK' for the first time, aiming to help small businesses and non-profits with their web projects.
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.
I trade under the name 'GHIJK' for the first time, aiming to help small businesses and non-profits with their web projects.
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.
I'm engaged by Prudential Assurance to help their team deliver a front end for pruadviser.co.uk
“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: