Who am I?

That's a good question. My name is Jonathan Hay, pleased to meet you.

My current occupation could be considered a “student” as I am a final year student at the University of Aberystwyth. However I engage in freelance web development, typically contracting out on a per job basis to companies who do not have the facilities to develop in house house for their prospective and existing clients.

In addition to this I as part of my degree I spent a placement year based with an innovations company in Wallingford called Quincom. I spent a large degree of my time developing several software systems which had to be built from the ground up; I won’t go into detail here however full descriptions for each of these projects can be viewed here under my recent projects. To any students currently considering a industry placement in the IT world I highly recommend it, the amount of experienced gained is 10 fold the experience you gain just doing 3 straight years (or more) of pure University.

What do I do?

I am a software developer by trade as you may of guessed however my primary field concerns internet related applications as well as also having a moderate graphical ability. Consequently I often delve into the more aesthetic side of web development rather than taking a purely code driven attitude with the assumption someone else will “make it look nice”. From start to finish I like to be involved with all aspects of a project and I put a heavy emphasis on good interface design, there is nothing more frustrating than having a great bit of software that the end user can’t understand because of poor frontend design – UI is important!

I have been developing applications both online and offline for nearly 10 years and have a wide range of experience from typically OO driven languages such as Java, Ruby and the .Net suite of languages to more script driven languages like PHP and JavaScript. Typically for web based applications I tend to prefer PHP or ASP/VB.net however I have recently spent a lot of time delving into Ruby (on the Rails) which is proving to be a very powerful and rapid development language.

If you are interested in some of my recent work feel free to take a look at my Portfolio or take a look at some of the Projects I am involved in.

Technical profile

For an overview on my technical abilities please view my Technical Profile. This details my programming, hardware and general technical proficienciess including virtulisation familiarity.

 

If you wish to know anything more about myself or my projects please contact me.