Online Gaming
I have an account in the Illyriad world where I pass some quality time with my teammates.
About Me
Hi, I'm Colin Styles, father, husband, web developer and computer geek.
After 13 years of service in the navy as a radar technician and with a wife and two children to provide for I decided to get into the burgeoning new personal computer market, get qualified and pursue a role as a programmer.
After achieving my Analyst Programmer Diploma, with distinction and earning a State Medal, my first job was at the help desk of a vehicle leasing company. When I wasn’t helping staff in thier various computer woes I was cutting code in COBOL to help save the world from the Y2K bug. Eventually I graduated to a role creating desktop applications in Visual Basic and enhancing the fancy new company website in old school, Classic ASP.
I allowed myself to be poached to work on a lucrative contract maintaining a prestigious retail website and building various in-house web applications for a large Australian retailer. It was here that I discovered the joys of Microsoft’s new ASP.NET technologies and built a number of simple CMS applications.
At the end of that contract I moved on to a role developing bespoke websites and managing a small team with a small multimedia firm in Sydney. The Global Financial Crisis has caused a huge business slow down. The company I was with merged and it was time to move on.
I am now working another company building fully owned web properties and some bespoke websites.
After 23 years of marriage and 19 years of raising our two boys we were blessed with the birth of our third child, a baby girl. My boys are pursuing careers in IT and my wife is getting on with the job of enjoying raising a girl and me … I’m just trying to pay for it all 🙂
Skills
What can I do?
Highlights
Server Side programming and Web Services in ASP.NET Web-forms and MVC Razor, using C# and VB.NET. Classic ASP websites using VB6 and COM. Visual Studio 2003 – 2008. E-Commerce gateway integration and bulk email management systems.
Web Client Side programming using HTML, CSS, Modern Java Script, JQuery and Json, standards compliant, cross browser XHTML, HTML 5 and mobile device optimized websites.
RDBMS Database design and implementation using MS SQL Server 2000 – 2019, Linq2SQL, Entity Framework and Nhibernate with SQLite.
Windows programming using C#, VB.NET, Visual BASIC 6, COM, VBS and Delphi.
Fun Stuff
What do I do for fun?
Recreational coding
I cut my coding teeth on 8-bit Z-80 computers and like to keep in touch with 8-bit and raspberry pi development.
Family
My weekends are occupied with the many outings that having a daughter demands.
Contact Me
If you would like to contact me, use the form below.