Profile of Guy Hickling, Web Developer
I am a professional web consultant and developer living in Newbury, in Berkshire, England. I create web sites for businesses, often
working as an independent IT contractor. Much of my work has been in the financial services industry, particularly in
pensions and insurance, so I am used to the regulatory environment in that industry.
History
I started my computing career with two UAT jobs, before taking my first programming role as a Z80 assembler programmer
working on a motor insurance system for a company in Reading. Next, after a brief foray into Cobol I, along with the rest
of the company, changed to the C programming language, as analyst/programmer, and I also became their chief
designer. Later still I moved on into C++, mostly on Unix systems. At this point I left permanent employment and spent the next 7 years
as an IT contract analyst/programmer. This period was very interesting, entailing work on a wide variety of hardware and software
systems, for a range of companies from Dunn and Bradstreet to work on a European satellite system at NRSC.
In 2001, now with fifteen years years IT experience, I began to realise that old forms of computer programming, creating
applications running on locally based computers, whether on large mainframes or small desktop PCs, would
disappear. They would one day be superseded by the world wide web, and probably sooner rather than later. This set me to
finding a new interest in web development, and taking on new skills in HTML, PHP, MySQL, and other related
web technologies. At a later stage I added CSS, then JavaScript and jQuery and some of the more recent additions to the web
developer's arsenal, such as "responsive development" to make web sites that adjust correctly whether they are being viewed on
mobile phones, notepads, or desktop PCs.