I've been programming for over 30 years, I started writing software in BASIC (on the Commodore Pet)
for the school programming software for the science department and writing games for teaching
mathematics to the remedial students. I went to night school at age 14, and passed my Computer
Studies O level in 1 year. I got a summer job working at a computer store, writing games on the
Atari 8 bit computers, and they would put the listings in a book and sell the games on tape.
I studied Computer Science A level and for my project I wrote a program that would convert English
language pseudo code into an executable BASIC program, on the BBC computer. I got a job writing
a database program as part of mini office suite in 6502 assembly language for the Atari 8 bit computer.
I left to go to University, where I studied Computers and Physics. After University I got a job at Binary
Design where I was writing games on the Atari ST (I wrote Hyperbowl, which the first omni directional
scroller on the system). Next I worked at Consult Software, where I programmed Vindicators, Dragon
Spirit, Last Ninja 2, and Little Puff in Dragon Land on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. I moved to
Domark at wrote The Spy Who Loved Me on the Commdore 64, and Thunderjaws on the ST and Amiga.
At Tiertex I wrote Rad Mobile on the Sega Master System, then I moved to Malibu Interactive where I
wrote Prime on the Sega Game Gear. I then worked freelance for a while trying to develop a game on
the Atari Jaguar and I did some R&D work for Microprose for a isometric 3D combat game. I then
worked at Traveller's Tales where I wrote Sonic 3D Blast on the Saturn, and PC. I also worked on
Bug's Life, Sonic R and programmed Buzz Lightyear of Star Command on the Gameboy Color. I then
worked on Gameboy Advance and wrote F-14 Tomcat, F-18 Strike Fighter and helped on the M&M's
party game. The F-14 Tomcat supported 4 player link play, which was the first game to do so.
I then moved into mobile phones working at Digital Bridges, where I wrote a 3D version of a racing
game, 2 Sport's Illustrated Quiz games, and a Java bytecode optimizer which allowed floating point
arithmetic to be converted to fixed point, and made code smaller which was an issue since some of
the phones only supported 64K jar size. At Javaground I wrote the Java to C++ converter which was
used to convert J2ME games to run on the BREW handsets (Verizon was the main carrier that used
BREW). I also wrote the libraries to support all the BREW handsets, and helped support the porting
when people had problems porting to BREW. I then worked on an implementation of the Android
JVM trying to port it to run on the BREW phones. I spent around 6 months after that working on the
Hutter Prize challenge which is an AI competition to compress 100MB of Wikipedia into the smallest
possible size. I've been tutoring and working on homework assignments since then, which is something
I find rewarding.