The world (and word) of jaymz

I have lifted this from my professional site for now… I’m more of a real human than the below may make out. I certainly swear a fuck load more… You’ll either know me as “Jaymz Campbell” or the more boring and vanilla “James Campbell”

My name is James and I live in Islington. I’ve been into web development since way back in the mid-90′s when my parents put me on a plane and sent me to Philadelphia for a few months. Barnes & Noble were having a firesale on their collection of ActiveX (yes, that) and VBScript books and for $5 each I grabbed as many as I could. At the time I thought it was almost magical that you could create a ‘full application’ (read HTML form + database) within just a browser. I hadn’t had too much exposure to ‘the internet’ at home in Ireland and so I really got into it on my 3 month holiday. Of course the massive savings I’d made on these hard-cover 3,000 page tomes was to catch up with me when I tried to board my flight home having stuffed them into my luggage but the exposure to HTML/Javascript/ASP was to linger…

When I hit 18 and it was off to university, unlike 90% of my friends I moved to London rather than Belfast or Dublin. My degree subject, Information Systems Engineering gives me a good grounding in the principals of decent software development, why you can only run microchips at a certain frequency and how to derive Heisinburgs uncertantiy principle from basic theory but what I really loved doing I found was web & design work. Any project that needed a web page, that was my thing. If a friend needed something whipped up I’d offer to do it. Got a party to organise? Let me create an elaborate and unneccasary flyer…

It wasn’t until I started working full time at Net Root though that I thought that I could actually finally settle into this as a career. It was after I’d done my first web site for the company for a paying client that I suddenly realised ‘wow, I’m actually doing this as a job.

Its been quite a while now that I’ve playing with sites & code. I think the thing I really love about web development is the fast pace and the huge open source community. As an avid Linux and general FOSS user I don’t think theres a better field to be in than web development. And if the code wasn’t enough I love working on servers. I get DNS, I smile when I SSH to a clean LAMP setup. There’s not a lot of ‘software’ jobs I could do which would have me setting up a server one day and then desiging an interface the next or working with over 5 different languages at a time, on top of frameworks. ‘Real Coders’ might use binary as the saying goes but happy coders build web apps.

This site serves as essentially my online CV so you will probably want to check out the few links at the top of the page. My personal site can be found at EvilJaymz.com, if you fancy clicking random links.