I started programming in Basic on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the 1980s. I then went on to use an Apple IIe in high school.
After serving in the South African Navy as a navigator, I studied graphic design and desktop publishing.
While working at The Natal Witness newspaper as a sub-editor I taught myself HTML and CSS. After my sub-editing shift I converted the news stories from Quark XPress to HTML in Notepad and helped create the newspaper's first website in 1996.
On moving to London in 1998 I worked at a large personal Finance website and helped take traffic from 20,000 pages per month to a record of 1,000,000 per day during the 1998 Budget speech. I then worked at a large digital marketing agency managing a large team.
I was a professional photographer for a number of years but during that time I programmed in PHP & MySQL on an ad hoc basis from around 2003, and since 2020 I've been a full time programmer utilising the Laravel framework with Tailwind, AlpineJS and Livewire.
Gary