When I landed in Brighton I went to every networking meeting I could find, and was particular about saying I was a “Drupal guy” as opposed to “Web Developer”, because in Brighton you didn’t have to look far to find the latter!

With the rise of Drupal and its more in-depth technology, Drupal people were harder to find, so I also founded the local Drupal User Group in Brighton, which became the largest in the UK.

Through my efforts I was asked to deliver the rebuild of celebrity gossip magazine HolyMoly! from Java to Drupal.

I’d started to use and talk about the Open Source Drupal framework, and through my networking efforts I was contracted to develop a Facebook application for Mazda with a Drupal backend.

Due to the amount of networking meetings I’d attended and organised where we always seemed to end up in the back room of a pub with dodgy internet connections, or in coffee shops with all the noise around, I’d had a “vision” of creating a network of Open Source Coworking Cafes which could also act as a “home” for the largely invisible world of Free/Libre Open Source Software.

Living in Essex I was close to Stansted Airport and at a time where many companies rented out fields from farmers which they would use as car parks, picking them up and dropping people at the airport so the customers had a smooth trip and never saw where the cars were parked.

Through the networking group I met the owner of one of these businesses, and had teamed up with another member who did graphic design, and thus my projects began to look a lot nicer!

By now I’d become a huge advocate of Open Source Software as it gave me the ability to provide enterprise level software functionality to small businesses, levelling the playing field.

I was honoured when asked to build the informational site LinuxVAR for the UK retail market and whilst I built it using the XOOPS Open Source framework, it’s actually the site which ended up making me move to Drupal!

Now back in Essex, I decided a good way to find projects would be to organise the local Ecademy networking meetings, the online business forum I was an active member of.

My assumptions were correct and led to me learning my first hard lesson in self-employment - always ask what the budget is! Supamax were an oriental food ingredients supplier who had stalls at universities and colleges, with foreign students being their main customer base.

There was a time when you couldn’t while away the hours choosing between peacock blue and cherry blossom paint, along with figuring out what the different upholstery materials were for your new car - all you could do in terms of interaction was order a brochure. Volkswagen broke the mould by creating what is now the mainstay of every car manufacturer’s website.

Another project of firsts, this was also a lesson in entrepreneurship for me. Commissioned by on course bookmakers to build the first online horse racing site which paid out once the race ended with no human interaction required, much of my involvement was in designing the integrations, and learning domain-specific algorithms like Rule 4 for horses not running.

Straight out of university, I connected with a small software house in London through an online business networking forum, joining as the sixth person in the company.

My career in IT begun in computer retail, then, following my dream of being a software developer, a short period of relational database programming - RPG/400 for IBM AS/400s - before deciding to attend university as a mature student.

Joining at the height of the dotcom period; we grew quickly to sixty people before the crash, when my million dollars of share options then vanished into thin air.