This blog is the culmination of geeky curiosity and desire to give back something that I hope is useful to others.
If you would like to connect with me or view my professional persona:
Like most of you, I work because life isn’t free and I wasn’t born into money. Throughout my career, I’ve worked at some great places and had amazing opportunities. I started the AI journey because although at the time blessed with an architecture job that paid relatively well, it utilised only a fraction of my tech skills.
I found my passion for coding at 9 years old and that has not lessened. My first computer experience was on a Tandy TRS-80 which I still have and treasure. The language was B.A.S.I.C, and despite being young I taught myself Z-80 assembler. By my teenage years had already written a BASIC and Forth compiler, tape drivers and a whole lot more. I used to hack/cheat games for magazines, but my favourite childhood memory was disassembling the CP/M o/s security at middle school, and subsequently bypassing the security as well as reversing the hashed password file (from binary patterns). Self-modifying code was a thing then, and using the refresh register to do it was genius were it not for MONA3 debugger that preserves the register whilst single-stepping. There wasn’t much I could not hack!
Thankfully, dial-up wasn’t a big thing in the UK during my early adult life, or I may well have gotten into “trouble”. Yes, I too want to know if there is an “alien cover-up”, but I am not that autistic to visit a prison cell.
Z-80 assembler still lives inside me: 0xc9 is a return, 0xcd is a call, 0x11 load DE, 0x01 load BC etc.
My favourite language of all time (and this might seem a little unusual) is ColdFusion. I spent 11 years building quality enterprise web applications (HTML, JavaScript, CSS etc.) with fairly large Oracle databases.
A close second would be Borland Delphi (Pascal) followed by Clipper.
In my time I’ve written a lot of code in C, and x86 assembler, but today I avoid them like the plague.
Pet peeves: Developers who think testing their code is “optional” and developers who are too lazy to add comments because their code is obvious to “them”.