Development Background
A Brief History of my Career in Professional Software Development
I began my career in 1998, working in Devon for a small family run company that provided analysis services in the field of oil exploration. I quickly specialised in the design and development of in-house and commercial desktop applications for Microsoft Windows using C++, Borland OWL, Microsoft Visual Studio and MFC.
After moving to Cambridge in 2006 I took a software engineer role at AVEVA, working on industrial software for the energy and marine sectors. My experiences there gained me many new skills including C#, .NET and WPF.
I made my first move into games development in 2008 when I began working at Frontier. I had to seriously get back into C++ to work on in-house tools used by the game designers. I also occasionally worked directly on the game engine to integrate new features or to help with milestones. In my later years there I used my knowledge of C#, .NET and WPF to help start building a new tools platform for the company. The exposure to multi-platform games development for PC, Xbox and PlayStation was certainly an interesting time.
After nearly 4 years working at Frontier, I moved on again to another brief role in oil exploration then back into games development once more when I started work at Jagex in 2013, staying there for the next 6 years or so. During my time at Jagex I mainly supported their RuneScape online MMORPG by developing and maintaining in-house proprietary content tools using Java, AWT, Swing and Eclipse.
In 2019 I left full-time employment to make a fresh start as an independent mobile app developer focused on the Apple iOS platform using Xcode and Swift. I immersed myself in the technology, learning, developing and eventually publishing my own app.
After working on my own mobile projects for about 2 years, I had to look for employment again as I discovered self-funded app development can only be sustained for so long... I took up a mobile developer role at Grid Smarter Cities in 2021 as a Flutter developer. Flutter was new to me, so I had to learn it quickly. It wasn't long before I was helping plan and implement a migration of an Android app from a partial Kotlin/Flutter hybrid to an entirely re-written full Flutter cross-platform app that could run on Android and the iPhone.