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Technologies

I firmly believe that concepts are more important than technology. Blindly applying a well-known tool to a new kind of problem can lead to problems. Keeping up with what’s new is more fun anyway, and it has its advantages.

Nevertheless a list of languages and technologies I’ve used is presented below.

Server technologies
ASP, VB, COM+ Used extensively as a principal developer at Spiral Software.
SQL Server, MySQL I’m at home in databases too: at Spiral I was responsible for design, maintenance, optimisation, stored procedures and triggers in SQL Server 2000. Acaso use MySQL for storing client data and objects, as does this site’s Drupal instance. I’m also using POSTGIS and PostgreSQL for personal projects.
Ruby on Rails I was probably a little late getting to this party but my application for Acaso Analytics is my first in production. I’m working on some of my own projects in Ruby on Rails too. Favourite plug ins: GeoRuby, YM4R and attachment_fu.
Drupal Several of my projects have involved the Drupal content management system. Modules I have used extensively include advanced forums, webform and views. I’ve written themes for Drupal sites too.
ASP.net, Java Some personal experience and small applications written in ASP.net and Java.
PHP Working knowledge and small applications developed in PHP. I pretty much stopped when I started working in Ruby on Rails.

Client technologies
HTML, XHTML, CSS You can’t get away from these technologies if you’re a web developer! I’ve had years of experience getting pages to work in Internet Explorer, Firefox and other browsers.
Javascript, JSON, AJAX Another essential language. Since my earliest experiences developing drop-down menus for IE4 and Netscape, Javascript has changed quite a bit. There are some powerful frameworks out there, and I particularly like working with EJSChart and JSON, which I combined for Owlstone. I also increasingly use JQuery and Prototype.
Flash, Actionscript I did a lot of work in Flash at Spiral Software, developing online product demos before screencasting was so easy. See also my Afrodisiac site.

General
XML, XSL Used extensively at Spiral, Owlstone, EFTPlus - all the time! The static HTML for this site is generated offline by transforming XML into HTML.
Source control Subversion, Visual SourceSafe, Team Foundation Server. Limited experience of Git.
Development environments Visual Studio (extensive), Eclipse (a little), Netbeans (more and more).
APIs I particularly love the outdoors and photography, so have worked a lot with Google Maps, custom tiles and overlays, KML, and a bit with the Flickr API.
Office & Graphics Microsoft Office, macros and customisation. I’ve used a couple of CRM systems, particularly GoldMine. I like Photoshop and have used a knock-off version but prefer having a clean conscience and using GIMP (an open source alternative). I’ve also used Fireworks and Paint.net.
I wouldn’t be without GPS, GPX, SyncML, WinMerge, Notepad++, Lifehacker, GMail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Tortoise SVN, OpenOffice, Skype.