Bio
History
When I was much younger, I used to hang out on various IRC channels and tinkered around with writing simple mIRC scripts to mimic IRC Bots (my first taste of “programming”).
Then I spent quite a while playing the excellent computer game Unreal Tournament (UT) – I badly wanted to make a “mod” for UT but had no idea what to make (and no programming skills) so I followed along some tutorials to make “mutators”; simple game changing tweaks. I had a failed attempt at a vampire mutator where in theory as you damaged enemies you would receive their lost HP. I didn’t work out but I did enjoy creating some [pretty bad] custom maps!
At the same time I enjoyed creating ghastly websites mostly using frames – I thought Dreamweaver was the height of cool.
When I was 14 I bought a book on Perl (I actually can’t remember why – I think I perhaps wanted to be a “cool hacker dude” or something) but totally didn’t get it due to the linuxyness and the fact that back then Perl on Windows wasn’t so easy so I gave that a miss for a while.
I loved History at school and didn’t bother with Computing because all it seemed to involve was Excel and websites made in Word.
These days I study Software Engineering, have gone back over the Learning Perl book, spend a lot of time in the command line and enjoy creating web applications of various kinds.
The Lowdown
This is my current view of computers [and other things].
I like Macs – you get all the command line joy of Linux with all the shiny/polish of Apple. I like Perl (and dynamic languages generally); certainly more so than Java.
I’m generally a fan of the whole open-sourcyness and like to tinker around with new things like Redis. Also, while not really being a PHP developer, I’m pretty happy to hack away on Wordpress or to work with CodeIgniter or CakePHP.
I’m happiest working with web related technologies and working on web applications. I find the setup of highly scalable web applications pretty intriguing too – High Scalability is a great blog!
Occasionally I’m interested in SEO, web analytics or web application security.
Finally, I enjoy music, cooking and nice shoes.
Experience
Since June ‘09 I have been working as a remote Perl developer writing modern Perl code using Moose, DBIx and Catalyst where possible.
For the period Aug. ‘06 – Sept. ‘07 I worked as web developer at a search conversion agency in London. I was involved with server side web development using Perl with CGI.pm. I mostly was involved with maintenance work for clients in the financial services industry. I also discovered the dark art of SEO, in which I became increasingly interested.
Education
I am about to enter my final year of a Computer Science/Software Engineering degree. My final year project is on the topic of automated discovery of Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection vulnerabilities in web applications.
During the degree I have been exposed to a wide array of topics: programming (java/c), databases (mysql/access), networking, 3d imaging (java3d/open GL), AI, software engineering and maths/logic.
For more information please see my CV.
Contact
If you’d like to get in touch, direct your emails to: adamjctaylor @ gmail . com.
If you’d like more regular updates of the fascinating things that happen in my life I’d suggest that you follow me on Twitter.
Social Networking
You can also find me on myspace, facebook, linkedin, last.fm, and flickr (I’m probably on others if you look hard enough).
