About

Ian is an Assistant IT Director, working for a large educational organisation in North-East Scotland. He currently manages a team of over fifty people, including developers and database administrators, manages various organisation-wide projects, attends lots of meetings and occasionally still writes some code. Brought up using an Acorn Electron, he wrote his first programs in BASIC and saved them to cassette tape. As technology improved, he soon moved on and developed applications in Visual Basic 6, including one which was rolled-out across his school to track & monitor usage. He started writing basic web pages in about 1999 and probably still has some of those visual abominations on 3.5″ disk somewhere. His first steps into the interactive web were with PHP, a language he still loves and uses today. After graduating University in 2007, he took a wrong direction and ended up doing IT Audit, a career that was (thankfully)  short-lived and in 2008 he started working as a Software Developer. Since then he has moved through the ranks, acting as Development Lead for a number of years and Development Manager before his current role.

As well being a passionate (and often opinionated) developer, Ian is interested in the softer side of technology – usability, user experience and human-computer interaction all feature highly on his reading list, as do articles about management. He is keen to learn from the different management practices across the industry and tries to pull the best bits together into his own unique management style. This blog aims to serve as a way of giving back and sharing his experiences with the community.