About me

Er, hi there.

I guess you’re here because you would like to know a bit about me, so here goes. I am the Senior Developer at EurekaStep Ltd, an Internet and New Media agency in Horsham, West Sussex, UK, where I develop and maintain websites, web applications and so on for clients including the UK Parliament, Shell Operations Africa, and the NHS.

I have also written a number of WordPress plugins including Comment Timeout, which allows you to close comments on old posts. For some reason, every blog engine that I’ve seen has this functionality except WordPress, which is why I wrote it.

My current skills and experience include ASP.NET/C#/SQL Server, PHP/MySql, Python, XML, XSLT, (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SOAP, Linux (Ubuntu and Gentoo), and beginner SharePoint and Ruby on Rails.

I have previously worked at Kingdom Faith, a major church and Christian ministry, as a web and database application developer. Although I am no longer a member of the team there, I am still involved with the church. Teenage regulars at Faith Camp may remember me as having been the keyboard player in the band at “Go Generation”, the ten and eleven year olds’ group, from 1999 to 2004. Older regulars will remember me as the son of John McKay, author of The Way of the Spirit Bible Reading Course.

I am a graduate of Selwyn College, Cambridge, where I read Natural Sciences (Physics).

Contrary to popular belief, I was not born in Scotland. I spent the first eleven and a half years of my life in Hull, which is about a hundred and fifty miles south of the border. When I was a child my friends all told me I was Scottish, but up in Scotland all my relatives told me that being born in England made me a “Sassenach,” in other words, irredeemably English. For some reason that I never quite understood, they seemed to change their tune about that after I got into Cambridge though…

On the rare occasions when I’m not at the computer, I enjoy doing various other things including music, photography, and entertaining my two nephews. My favourite food is Sara Lee double chocolate gateau and my pet hate is mince.

About this blog

The reasons why I started this blog are lost in the mists of time somewhat. My original plans were to either (a) make it a complement to my contributions to the ASP.NET forums and whatever other online communities I am involved with, or (b) act as a complement to, or even a substitute for, our annual Christmas lettter. It has actually ended up being my random ramblings on anything and everything you can imagine with no particular end in mind. There’s a lot of geeky stuff on here (I am, after all, a computer geek), but hopefully there is enough non-geeky stuff to capture the interests of everyone.

There is something of a standing joke about my blog around the office. From time to time, one particular individual (who will remain anonymous) prophesies about some joke or other, “That’s going on your blog!” These prophecies tend not to be fulfilled. This is a serious blog after all, not MySpace…