Le Grand Méchant Loup

If you are perhaps too lazy to run it through an online translation tool or do the olde-world thing and look it up in a dictionary, “le grand méchant loup” means “the big bad wolf” in French. I like this nickname not because I might have some morbid desire to eat your grandmother or huff, puff and blow your house down, but just because I like wolves and think the name sounds interesting. I also enjoy hearing people mispronounce it, which I suppose is funny the first time around.

As I am not a particularly great fan of self-congratulatory monologues – they are as tedious to write as they are for all of you poor souls to read – I am ever so slightly reticent about writing an “about me” page; after all, there will always be something that somebody disagrees with or takes the wrong way. Instead I’ll choose to dish out the facts and let you do the interpretation bit.

I am a professional front end web developer (as opposed to being one of those strange fellows who dabble around with back ends) and have worked in the web industry from sometime in 1998 when I decided that working in insurance was starting to mess with my head. Having started by playing around with basic HTML and building a portfolio of small personal project sites I shoehorned my way into doing this stuff for real, first with Siemens in the wonderful concrete Berkshire metropolis of Bracknell and then CSC in nearby but far leafier Fleet in Hampshire. A number of years of freelance contracting followed, which saw me build up a steady client base as well as undertake contract work for cutting-edge digital leader Mook in grimy old London town.

My time with Mook brought me into contact with a chap called Trenton Moss, whom I later learned was one of the leading gurus in the art of website accessibility and usability – something I had never really thought of before when designing websites and cooking up code. Needless to say I was immediately hooked on the idea of separating design from content, and quickly started to swot up on W3C compliant XHTML, cooking up CSS hacks (yes, some people are still using that hellish browser called IE6) and chucking out old HTML furniture.

These days I am stationed in the suburbs of West London working for Ladbrokes eGaming, overseeing the front-end development of a suite of websites in what is an ever-evolving portfolio. If people are going to put money on it, I will probably end up building the front end for it.

I have over the years been able to carefully manage my spare time – albeit in my own particularly haphazard way. Thankfully my interests can be easily extended to the Internet, and this has been best illustrated by my historical information sites on Günther Prien and Michael Wittmann which have expanded exponentially from the time they were one-page special interest projects back at the beginning of the decade. These sites have over the years become “best of breed”, in that I have acted as consultant on a number of projects and have promised myself that I will write a book or two one day.

When I am not sitting behind a computer I enjoy travelling (more often than not to places with a military connection or a venue that happens to happily coincide with a Springboks rugby fixture), reading (military history, surprise, surprise) and writing (which takes the form of either military history or ranting about something or another). How my lovely partner Caroline has managed to put up with me for so long is something of a mystery, and I can only put it down to either my natural charm or her willingness to be bored rigid with tales from the Ostfront and the rantings of an ultraconservative.

In addition to this boring stuff I also enjoy my role as an armchair sportsman and wannabe home masterchef – at which I cannot be too bad as I haven’t poisoned anybody so far. There’s nothing better than preparing a rare fillet of duck in a plum sauce with a side of rocket salad and scoffing the lot with a chilled glass of Schöfferhofer Weizen while watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall dissect some roadkill.

Well, that’s enough about me – if you are interested in my portfolio you can click on the link that will soon become available here covering my work with both Mook and Ladbrokes, or at my professional site Wolf71 where you can see a selection of some of my personal and freelance sites, including some wonderful relics that go back almost a decade – there only because the clients love them so much and have no desire to get the latest fully-compliant CMS-driven setup…