About Me
If you’ve not already gathered, my name is John Topley and this is my website. I grew up in Lincoln in the East Anglia region of England, although I now live some two hundred miles further south, in Hampshire. I moved to be with my partner and to make a living developing software. I’ve been in full–time employment since 1994, doing administrative work in local government for a number of years and presently working as a computer programmer for the Civil Service.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (the rubber key one!), which my Dad bought in 1982 and which I loved dearly. I’ve been involved with PCs since about the same time as I started work. Although I did some programming using BASIC on my Spectrum and at school, it wasn’t until I started using Borland Delphi in 1996 that I realised that I actually really enjoyed programming and wouldn’t mind getting paid to do it. Since then I’ve also programmed to varying degrees in Smalltalk, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, Visual Basic, VBA, VBScript, Microsoft Access and SQL. I can also turn my hand to HTML and CSS. I started off developing small Windows desktop utility programs that I needed and now find myself creating Web applications using J2EE in the day and Ruby on Rails in my own time.
When not sat in front of a computer screen I like music, travelling, walking, eating out, reading, digital photography, thinking and sleeping, but not necessarily in that order!
