i-JK is my new website. Welcome.

Things are still very much under development and being designed so nothing you see here is final, but it's ready enough for the prime time. This site's purpose is to provide me with a web presence, allowing me to showcase the projects I've done and the clients I've worked with, hopefully helping gain me more work in the future. It's also place to vent my spleen and comment on happenings in world news, environment, science, the web - plus write about and encourage comments on design and developement work I'm currently engaged in.

Perhaps surprisingly this is my first personal website despite me having done web design and development since I first got on the Internet back in 1996 when I started reading Media Computing at Exeter University. I've been writing code since I got my first rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum and making digital images and designs since my beloved Amiga 500 arrived. So I've been a builder of websites for over a decade, a hacker of code since I was seven (I'm 31 now) and a pusher of pixels since my first mouse-based computer in 1989. If my pedigree and commitment isn't in doubt, why only now do I decide I need this site?

I've come close to this many times before. I've been building sites 'on the side' for years, playing around with designs that went nowhere, coding little fragments that I hoped would coalesce into a full site, but never actually taken the plunge. I guess by the time the Internet and I were acquainted, I was working with computers from 9 to beyond 5 and the thought of yet more time in front of the screen never appealed. I guess I'm not a true hard-core geek - nearly, but not quite.

So the reason for this site is simple: I want to be my own boss! I've had nearly a 2 year mini-retirement from the world of work which has given me tremendous perspective on the IT treadmill and associated office-based rat race. I've always been interested by web design and development, so it seems only natural to I try to do what I'm good at and enjoy for a living. I now have renewed vigor for web design and development, partly because of my time away and partly because the way the web works has changed. Thanks to the continual improvement of the free, open source technologies, the web has matured and become a much more satisfying place to be and develop for.

That's not to say designing and developing for the web is easy and effortless, it's really not and the complex issues and interrelated decisions arise regardless of technologies used. What I am saying is that I can nowadays assume all the low-level monotony - the kind of work every project needs over and over - is done and dusted, leaving me free to get on with building cool and interesting things rather than reinventing the wheel. Mature, powerful, open source software, technologies and frameworks like Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, jQuery, Firefox, Firebug and Drupal leverage the power of a million geeks working for the common good. I use their expertise and benefit from the fruits of their labour every time I turn my computer and use the internet on. So do you.

Thanks to free open source software, I can get on with the highly creative and interesting design and programming tasks and let the commuity take care of bugs, updates and improvements to my tools. I help them in return by reporting bugs, spreading the word and submitting my own ideas and improvements.

But I digress. Welcome to i-JK, stay tuned for more, post a comment below or feel free to drop me a line.