Chris Northcott

I’m Chris Northcott, a Web developer from Essex, in sunny England, and this is my blog. I enjoy creating usable, pretty and functional front-end code using PHP/MySQL, ASP.NET/SQL Server and jQuery. In addition I enjoy playing with electronics, specifically microcontrollers like the Atmel AVR and the Altera family of FPGAs.

A few little bits about me:

• I was born in the tiny City of Ely, Cambridgeshire. Douglas Adams defines an ‘ely’ in The Meaning of Liff as “that feeling you get when something has gone horribly, horribly wrong”.
• I love cats. We have three, Poppy, Interceptor (whose naming is explained here) and Tia.
• I have served time as an office coffee-b*tch, a forum maintainer, a back- and front-end Web developer, and an SEO consultant. I’m currently freelancing. You can hire me here.
• I’m a CakePHP ninja.
• My favourite food is pizza. *shock horror*
• I was one of the first 10k users on Google+…
• …as well as the first million on Facebook…
• …and Twitter.
• Wikipedia fo’shizzle.

Likes: Randomness. Pizza. Cats. Shiny things. The Internet. Anime.

Dislikes: Corporate government collusion. e & π (only alone. e^πi + 1 = 0 is another matter.)

Strengths: Open-minded. Easy to talk to and make friends with. Funny (sometimes). Will fix your computer if you’re a nice person.

Weaknesses: Clumsy. Sometimes impatient. Short tempered.

I won’t use Windows on bare metal, instead using Ubuntu for day to day work and running Windows in a VM. I’ve had this policy for a few years now and it has served me well whilst also turning me into somewhat of a Linux specialist.

I believe that education and information freedom is essential for the growth of the IT industry as a whole, and the sooner this is realised the sooner we’ll start advancing again in this field.