About Me

Welcome to my corner of the web.

I’ve recently started streaming some development on Twitch and thought that it might be a good idea to have somewhere that I can post up some companion posts as well as other random musings.

Growing up I started programming on a Sinclair Spectrum +2 or something very similar - I can’t really remember the exact model designation. There is a bit of a family joke that says that I could program in BASIC before I could talk. Whether that’s hyperbole or not I can never be sure but one thing that I do know is that I can’t remember not being able to either talk or write some simple BASIC. Moving from there I went through the Amiga line of computers where I cut my teeth on simple HTML and the relatively early web.

Once I moved onto PCs I discovered Visual Basic 4 and could finally do some ‘real’ programming. As a child still, I was very excited by the possibilities of programming against a GUI. Fast-forward a few years and we get through Java and C at university (I’ve forgotten most of my C knowledge since and want to relearn it.) In my working life I started with PHP and moved very quickly back to a Microsoft stack with C#.

For the last few years I have been working exclusively with .NET in a professional environment and apart from a brief interlude with VB.NET it’s all been with C#. At first I was engrossed with the OO paradigm of programming, however, with some of the projects that I was growing on expanding I discovered some rather serious problems with pure OO and found F#, functional programming and F# for fun and profit - a wonderful website that explained many things about functional development and F#.

While I still use C# in my professional life I have moved to a more functional style of programming whereas here, on my Twitch stream and my personal projects I have started to move across to F# and have seen some modest success. I would like to invite you to join me in learning about F# and then spreading the word about F# and functional programming if you enjoy it.