Clients & Projects---and Other Work

Year of Change: 2008

For the first half of this year, for the most part I kept doing what worked out pretty great for my clients and myself. I used my SharePoint and .NET skills to help people get to where they wanted to be. Those projects are listed on the right.

In other work, mounting dissatisfaction with the tools that were available to enterprises and organisations today (notably SharePoint!) let to my decision to start building a better Enterprise software platform. No small task. Consequently, I switched from Windows to Linux and started learning Lisp: I wanted MetaLeap to stay browser-based but go cross-platform. I wanted the most powerful language I could find. I wanted a language so obscure I couldn't possibly require Enterprise clients or end users to write add-ons or their own solutions in it: thus forcing myself to work even harder at creating a platform where programmatic work should not be necessary to build great solutions in the first place. (If you go for .NET or Java there is the danger of just opening up your API and saying: "I know you can't program, but there are too many talented and affordable .NET / Java coders out there who can build what you need. Or just hire our consultants!" Lisp? Not so. Programming should only be necessary for back-end infrastructure protocol handling or foreign bindings---not for metadata, data (access, display, exchange), workflow, transformation, filtering, grouping, aggregation and so forth: that's one of my mantras for MetaLeap.)

Year of Consulting: 2007

My major focus in 2007 was project work. I positioned myself in the market for C# / .NET / SharePoint freelance professionals and completed a great number of projects (for both SMEs and a few well-known clients such as Philips, BP or Sony) most-often in fruitful co-operation with partner firms such as PSC Business Solutions and Acom Multimedia.

Microsoft launched SharePoint 2007 to big success. I learned a lot about the ins and outs of the kinds of software systems that Enterprises want to buy or build, how and why. Initially I was a .NET developer who found SharePoint straightforward to work with, and an interesting and inspiring concept. Increasingly, I witnessed some of its weaknesses and certain frustrations caused to end users, administrators and developers: there had to be a better way and a system like this could be done in so many better ways. Only later, way into 2008, did I make the decision towards building a better Enterprise software platform.

Years of Study: 2002 - 2006

Some of this time (2002 - 2005) was spent studying "Computing & Intelligent Systems" at Brookes University in Oxford, England.

Some of the time I spent working on a variety commercial / freelance / bespoke consulting and development projects. These are listed on the right. I certainly liked doing all of them—it is refreshing to work toward a well-defined goal with a deadline, to deliver, and to be paid!

But most of this time was spent developing private projects that were fun, interesting, challenging. They could have become startups, they could have become open source systems, but eventually they never made it to the outside world. Their primary purpose was for me to build, to create, and above all to make mistakes and learn.

I built prototypical A.I. systems, I wrote computer languages, several web content management systems (everyone did this back in the day, it seems!), all kinds of developer and productivity tools, and I built SuDoku Pro and Quotator.

I started in 1998 with QBasic, HTML in 1999, Visual Basic in 2000, ASP and PHP in 2001, and everything else (XML / CSS / SQL / ETC / ETC) with .NET as my core platform and C# as my core language from 2002 onwards.