About
Web Development
I started building websites when I was about 15, when I found a copy of FrontPage on our computer and a free hosting account with geocities or similar. My tastes took a while to mature, but by the time I went to university I was a well developed PHP coder and had a much better sense of design. I had built a few small(-ish) apps by the time I went to Uni, but they were very non-standards compliant and in retrospect, quite embarrassing. I now use a lot of frameworks and MVC based design principles, which I believe can be massively beneficial to web apps in the long run. I'm also a big advocate of Object Oriented PHP - even though it is only just coming into the realm of proper Object Orientation, I still believe it is something which can make an application that much more maintainable than a normal Procedural approach.
Click here to view my CV.
Imaginary Roots
Why Imaginary Roots? Good question. During my A-level years I acquired a massive love for mathematics, and so when it came tonaming my website, I wanted to choose something that was quite mathematical in nature. I belive I actually chose the name having randomly opened maths textbooks and tried to find phrases I thought were cool on them. However, with hindsight, the link to imaginary numbers is something I think you can find meaning in. Imaginary numbers were invented since it seemed appropriate to have something which represented the square root of -1, something which was believed to not exist before. This sort of "That would be useful, let's invent it" attitude is very apt in the field of software engineering, and is something I try and stick to. The world of web apps is of course opening this field up to the masses, and so now there is very much a "That would be useful, let's build a web app" attitude going around - something which I promote and participate in.
This site has gone through many (MANY) iterations over the last few years. This latest one sees a return to a custom built backend. Previously I have used WordPress for my blog, which, don't get me wrong, is a superb system which I would most definitely use again. However I decided I wanted a unified admin panel to make updating the site a bit easier, and so opted to migrate everything into the new backend.
The backend itself is built using CakePHP, and for the front end I use the Mootools Javascript framework for the effects. I also use tinyMCE in the admin side of things to help with content formatting.