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I’m me. woo.

Actually, I’m James (you could have probably guessed that from my email address) and I work for Deutsche Bank in London, heading up support and operations for the Web Infrastructure team. We do all the cool web-based hosting like Apache, Tomcat, WebLogic, etc. for 100s of internal groups and it’s my team’s job to keep it all running.

So here’s what I’ve been involved in over the years…

• Public domain Acorn applications. Most of the information on this is still on-line over at www.doggysoft.co.uk. I wrote a whole load of the apps listed there including Palette, Cookies, MusicSDP and IconDir, although the other guys on the team did much better stuff than me All ARM assember.
• Commercial Communications Package and Internet Suite. Way back when, you couldn’t just connect to the Internet, you needed to write a tcp/ip stack, a web browser, a news browser, a mail client, an ftp client and server, http, smtp and nntp fetchers, terminal emulators, a dial-up scripting language, modem control, etc. We were stupid enough to decide we could do all this in ARM Assember for the Acorn. From scratch. And to be clear, I really mean that: tcp/ip stack, web browser, mail program and everything in-between - from scratch. To cut a long story short: Termite Internet was born. No-one could claim it was a business success, but we did manage it, and sold it at several exhibitions in London with professionally done manuals and everything. You name it, it did it. A fun time. We were assembler gods back then! (Or mad, whichever label you prefer.)
• Web Space Hosting. Again, way back when, you couldn’t host your web site off an ADSL link. That hadn’t even been thought of. You had a 14k4 modem and were dreaming of an 28k8. Always-on connections were expensive, co-location was expensive too. You went to a web space hosting provider who had their own unix machines and networking kit and a really really expensive leased line. So that’s what we started from scratch. Rented offices in the centre of Coventry, got our hardware, linked it all up, installed OpenBSD on it all, Apache, ftp servers, and all that - then spent several days marvelling at a 64k leased line link before adverts came out in the industry press - and we had a business: Oaktree Internet Solutions Ltd. Another fun time.
• Internet Service Provider and Web Site Design. Three groups, including Oaktree, combined to form Internet Solutions for Business Ltd./Inc., or IS4B as it was known. This was a company which went through the .com boom and bust like many, and went from a few people right up to 30 or so employees - and back down again. I was a (non-executive) Technical Director. We moved in to canal-side offices, and our Internet link went from 128k all the way up to 2Mbit (which was fantastic in 1999) due to the amount of stuff we did. This included core ISP activities like dial-up hosting, co-location, unix shell accounts and web space, but also fully fledged web site design. We wrote the code behind loads of web sites, some relatively famous like London Taxis International and Dunlop. This was done mostly in PHP, which back then was a brand new langauge (which sucked, even back then) and this obscure free database called MySQL which nobody had heard of. Then the company ran out of money. And went bust in 2001. But the writing was on the wall before that, and I left in January that year.
• Not working. So, I’d handed in my 3 months notice to IS4B. Waiting a month or so - I looked for jobs. Got a job at EO Plc., off Piccadilly Circus in London, a company specialising in IPOs. Recevied a written offer in the post. All set to start in a month or so. Then, I kid you not, about 2 days before I was due to start I get a call to tell me the job wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t believe it. It was something like the Thursday before I was due to start on the Monday! But - and this was the cool thing - they sent me a months pay anyway. I didn’t even turn up to the office, and they sent me a months pay, tax free. Cool huh? Needless to say (and you might have guessed this when I said they specialised in IPOs), they ran out of money and went bust, and years later I saw a press release when their assets were sold off…
• Web Infrastructure at Deutsche Bank for over five years, latterly Global Head of Support and Operations. Previously DAP Product Manager (to May 2005) and previous to that dWeb Head of Engineering (to Dec 2003).
• I start at Merrill Lynch soon…