Simon’s life – Reader’s Digest Version
I graduated from CPIT with a Bachelor in Visual Communication in 2002. This was my introduction to building websites in tables (yuck). I went back to school (Natcoll) to continue my web quest, and in 2006 finished with a Diploma in Web Development.
Rather than jump into work straight away, I took a year off to travel around South East Asia. Near the end of my travels in ended up in Vancouver, Canada — a city I liked.
Back to reality in Christchurch, I landed one contract job with Adscale, as a Frontend Developer to help its Java Developers with HTML layouts, and to battle IE6.
I juggled this contract job with another at Avatar Web Promotions. I enjoyed the varied projects at Avatar, but not its choice of CMS: Joomla. I was already doing freelance work with WordPress, and I managed to convince management to use it instead.
I had in mind to go back to Vancouver one day, and when my buddy said there was a job going at Signals, I jumped at it. Arrived on a Thursday, said farewell to its web developer on Friday, and started work on the Monday.
I enjoyed my life there (over 2 years), but the weather sucks. Simon can’t put up with rain for 8 months straight. Australia doesn’t have this issue, and so now I have my mind set on going there in April 2013! Just don’t mention snakes, spiders, crocs, jellyfish, sharks, drop-bears…