I’m Andrew McCombe and this is my personal blog where I write about things that interest me or things that I would like to keep a record of.
I’m a website developer and programmer and I work at iWeb Solutions Ltd in Stafford, England. My job entails a wide variety of tasks from project management, server administration, back-end and front-end programming. I have worked on a variety of projects in the last 10 years ranging from small static sites through to large ecommerce stores.
Some of the projects I have worked on include:
- www.djdownload.com
- www.yourdesign.co.uk
- www.breakbeatonline.com
- www.properdistribution.com
- www.alstonhall.com
My computing life began waaaay back in the early 80’s when my Father bought my brother and I a Commodore Vic20. I remember tinkering around with it, playing Frogger and writing the programs that came in the Vic 20 manual. From there I progressed on to an Atari 600XL. I enjoyed writing games for that using basic and I remember the graphics code being fun to play with.
There was a gap of around 4 years before my youngest brother got a Commodore 64 for Christmas one year. I really got my teeth into that one and eventually wrote games in Assembler for it. At one point I used two C64’s connected with a parallel cable. I used an assembler called Turbo Assembler to write code on one C64 and run it on the other. Those were the days! (thanks Electric Boys, The Rowland Brothers and Commodore Format Magazine).
I moved on from there to an Amiga 1200. I dabbled in Blitz Basic for a while but left the games side of things to learn HTML and JavaScript. This was around 1995 and I used browsers called Amosaic and iBrowse. I had a subscription to Amiga Format Magazine and when Future Publishing called it a day my subscription was changed to Linux Format. Since getting issue 1 in May 2000 I have used Linux ever since.
My programming skills are heavily based on the LAMP stack with PHP and MySQL being my main weapons of choice. I have also tinkered with Java, Python, C/C++ and also have some experience with Visual Basic.
Personal
I am married to Amy and live on the edge of Cannock Chase in England. We have two cats called Marble and Storm. My interests are in reading Sci-fi and Manga, listening to music, watching motor racing (F1 and BTCC) and working on my house and garden.
Socials:
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/euperia
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/andrew.mccombe
If you’d like to contact me you can email me at the following (if you can work it out!): reverse ( ‘moc.liamg@airepue’ )
