Well, just about everybody in the world seems to have a blog these days, so I thought I’d dive right into the party and start my own.

So I hear you all cry, why the heck would you want to make yet another blog? Well, there’s two main reasons:

Firstly, I’ve been following a lot of ColdFusion blogs recently, and while there are some very good blogs out there, very few seem to be based in the UK, and at times it would be nice to have more articles looking at things from this side of the ocean. It’d be good also just to do my bit to promote ColdFusion in the UK, and get to know more CFers worldwide!

Secondly, my partner Zoe has been running a successful blog for a few months now, which is what really got me interested in blogging again. She does a lot of papercrafting (mostly making cards), and just watching how having a blog has been such a useful networking and information-sharing tool has rather impressed me!

So, who am I? Well my name’s Craig Vincent, I’m a “web programmer” for Accent Design Ltd, a print & web design studio based in Norwich, England in the UK. I am one of two programmers in the web development side of the office, accompanied by two web designers, however we all intermingle.

I began developing in PHP back in 2003, thinking it was pretty neat to be able to do a lot more with websites rather than just have static pages, and my interest has grown from there. Back in 2004 I wrote a web-based system to manage coursework deadlines and submissions for my college, which was my first substantial (yet nowhere near perfect) creation. I continued to refine my knowledge throughout college.

After this, I started at the University of East Anglia, on a Computer Science course, and was gently nudged into “real” programming – this namely meant programming in Java, and a more structured and strict way to program. I focussed my degree on courses relating mostly to internet web applications, databases and networking, which seemed to fit really well together. In the final year of my degree course, I developed a “sports complex managment system” for managing most aspects of a leisure centre or sports club. This was a complex system which involved calculating and arranging fixtures for sports teams and much more, but it came with  great sense of achievement. The system was written using Java/J2EE servlets in most part, relying on a MySQL database behind the scenes.

I worked on various personal projects, contract work and also some voluntary work as a Web Developer within the Citizens Advice Bureau, developing internal web applications to increase productivity and looking into creating a web-based version of AIMS (Advice Information Management System) which they used, however I personally think it would have been impossible given the “limited” resources we had at our disposal.

After this, I landed my current job at Accent, which has only increased my passion for web development but also opened up my eyes more to real world things (timescales, budgets, errors and all those other gems of delight), but working as part of a highly skilled team has really driven me to continue improving my own skills ensure we’re doing the best we can. I should also mention that this is where I came to learn ColdFusion, and while I still do enjoy using PHP, I can also really appreciate the numerous benefits that ColdFusion brings to the table.

I’m going to leave it there for now – enough rambling, but hopefully stay tuned for more interesting (and shorter) posts!