In the February of 1983, in a midlands hospital I was brought into this world.
Need to fill out / kill this bit.
I began my education studying at St Wystan's School in Repton until my parents divorced. Due to our relocation to Woodville I was transferred to the Belmont Primary School.
My first year at Belmont felt like I was repeating a year of my education, I believe that it is this year that seeded my arrogant opinion regarding my academic abilities, that I later realise will become my downfall academically.
Upon reaching the relevant age I progressed up to the Granville Community School, my default catchment school. Nothing much to report regarding my time spent here, a top student leaving the school having achieved all higher grade passes in my GCSE examinations.
My most proud achievement while here was probably the development of my musical abilities, being 1st Cornet player in the school band while also working my way up the local musinc center bands (see later).
With my excellent GCSE results, entering the South Derbyshire Post 16 Center (An extention of the Pingle School) I was poised for a promising academic career and choosing Maths, Physics and IT as the A-levels to study I knew I was in for a challenging, yet interesting, time.
Unfortunately, I don't know why, perhaps it was the complexity of my chosen subjects, my arrogance towards my education or the distraction provided by my first girlfriend, I began my academic downfall, only achieving D grades in my IT and Physics A-levels, when I really could have been capable of achieving so much more.
On a more positive note(excuse the pun), my musical career blossomed. I gained a new focus for my musical studies as I continued to rise through the ranks of the music centre ensembles and lead the Pingle School Big Band.
Due to my dissapointing A-level results, the journey that is my life, was to continue to Leicester to study a batchelors degree in Computer Science at De Montfort University. Between the time spent earning the money to survive and study, my musical career came to a complete halt, however this was excusable due to the fact that I was greatly enjoying the challenging work required by my studies and I was achieving module results in line with a student capable of attaining a first class degree.
As part of my degree I was required to complete a year out in the industry where I was lucky enough to find a placement with Syngenta Crop Protection AG in thieir Switzerland based head quarters as part of their OASIS team.
While studying for my A-levels I started part time work for McDonald's at the Appleby Magna store. I consider this as an excellent start to my working life as this was an excellent environment in which to learn key skills that will be useful for the rest of my working life. While working here I managed to earn myself the awards of Employee of the Month and Employee of the Quater.
When I moved to University I transferred stores to work at the Eastgates store in the centre of Leicester. During my first year at Eastgates we had the 3rd highest sales in the country, this change in pace was a huge challenge coming from Appleby but one that I was able to rise to as shown by my receiving the award of Employee of the Year for 2002.
As previously mentioned I spent my University work placement year on the OASIS team at Syngenta's head office in Basel, Switzerland. This was a great opportunity enabling me to experience my first technical employment in a different country which also allowed me to experience life in a different country and meet some great people.
The worst employment decision of my life so far, when I returned from Switzerland I took a Christmas job as a porter at the Argos in Leicester city centre. This job required many hours of work through the night while I was studying leading to me missing many lectures during the months of December and January. I finally broke free of Argos at the end of January when I decided that I was earning enough money to get by with the freelance work I was doing (see below).
To help finance my way through University I took up some freelance programming contracts, primarily working for Rokk Media I have worked on many diverse projects from realising web site layouts to implementing e-commerce solutions. I was also invited to develop an example application for use by one of my University lecturers.
Coming completely up to date, I have just signed a contract with Opera Software to work on their Web Applications team in Oslo, Norway. I hope that this becomes a highly successful placement...only time will tell.