My Name is Nik Simms, I am 38 years old and live in Yealand Redmayne  South Lakes UK.

I’m sure if you look through my blog you will see what I am all about but basically I love learning about anything new and old, I aim to find out how it works, fix it and improve on it.

I enjoy programming online and offline on any platform, I do work on my 1966 classic Hillman Imp Super (welding, spraying, tuning and breaking), this generally takes my mind off the programming or makes me think of things differently. I watch some football, drink good quality wine, beer, cider and savour well prepared food (not pub food).

I have partner Kate and two child, Ben (9) and Ellis (7), Ellis has Type 1 Diabetes from 18 month.

I’ve always been interested in computers from 6th form using the Nimbus and then art college using the Apple Mac SE’s and yes  I did the programming of Basic on the Dragon 32. I started in  industry doing graphic design for 10 years before getting hooked on web design, development and now programming that being some 12 years ago. I do a lot of theory and generally messing with the workings. I’ve played with Linux, built my own servers, hosted my own sites on my own hardware at home and in telehouses. I’ve played with Windows IIS etc what a joy. I’ve mucked around with MacOS ( lots of the early stuff and little of the late stuff as it is basically the same as the Linux systems). I muck around with bluetooth for advertising http://www.ad2hand.co.uk and like the thought of letting everyone with a mobile phone know about it.

Education:
Bolton 6th form
Bolton college of Higher Education (Art and Design)
Salford University BA(hons) (Multi Art and Design)

Work:
1991 – 1992 Hillington shirt company Manchester  – Mac designer – mostly catalogue layouts
1992 – 1994 Barnabys Clothing company – Mac designer
1994 – 2000 Taurus Limited Bolton – Print for T-shirts doing Illustrations using mostly Apple Macs
2000 – 2007 Portfolio Art & Design – Web Designer / Programmer / Developer
2007 – Now  – Delineo Manchester – Senior Interactive Developer

Programming capabilities:
I am focused on Microsofts .Net framework with programming offline apps as well as online.

I am currently program for LAMP as well as WinTel IIS platforms in PHP, C# and VB and probably all my jobs involve SQL either being MySQL or MSSQL.
I consult on anything that is new and old from server admin to Search engine optimisation but I do find they do have an effect on core programming.
Programming is fast, Debugging is slow (too many legacy browsers) and deployment is as fast as your network.

I have programmed everything from Perl Daemons to Java to actionscript, they are all the same at the end of the day but all need reviewing.

My favourite tool at the moment is Visual Studio basically because Adobes tool just doesn’t give you enough feedback which wastes time. The Microsoft VS intelliSense is great but I don’t like the return button action. If you setup a .Net website and do it on Visual Studio and by the book you get speed, quality and subliminal learning.

My worst tool at the moment is Adobe Flash, why when you can get the same effect using  javascript (AJAX) and you can have all your content visible to all the search bots.

References:
Portfolio Design
Delineo