About me
I began creating websites as soon as I graduated from university. Come to think of it, I didn't even wait till I'd graduated! When my final exam was done, I went back to my room at Downing College, Cambridge, and bought my first domain name: firstwriter.com. The site went on to become a great success and is still going today, but I wish now that I had thought of a better name!
firstwriter.com became the number one ranked site in the world for a number of broad search terms, such as "poetry competition". I also became the first person in the world to advertise on Google for a number of search terms, including "literary agents". This all enabled the site to become one of the world's best-known sites for writers.
I've also worked for Thomson Reuters as a Senior Editor and Senior Technical Content Specialist.
Currently, I'm helping to develop the AI offering of one of the world's largest tech companies by working with Outlier to provide their Software Engineers with detailed evaluations of their Large Language Model's responses. At the same time, I'm undertaking a Full-Stack Engineer course from Codecademy Pro to freshen up and expand my coding skills.
Projects
firstwriter.com
firstwriter.com is a website for writers, listing literary agents, magazines, publishers, and writing competitions. The current iteration of the site is written primarily in PHP and features a MySQL database containing multiple tables and tens of thousands of entries. It also includes a legacy flat-text database managed with Perl.
Page Checker
Page Checker is a tool built in PHP using a MySQL database to support work on firstwriter.com. It monitors web pages for changes by scraping URLs and diffing the results against previous versions of the pages. To avoid unnecessary hits, it allows specific sections of web pages to be selected and monitored for changes, ignoring changes in other areas of the page. It is not publicly accessible.
JP&A Dyson
A small static site showcasing the material produced by JP&A Dyson, including sections for websites and published books, as well as a contact form built using PHP.
Jammming
Jammming is a React web app that interfaces with the Spotify API to allow users to search for tracks, build playlists, and save them to their Spotify account.
Axis and Allies 1941 Battle Simulator
Still a work in progress, this tool uses JavaScript to simulate battles in the popular board game, Axis and Allies 1941. Users can specify different combat scenarios and have them played out a thousand times in a matter of seconds to see which side is most likely to win, and what the most likely outcome is.