Freelance Android and Python Developer

I’m a freelance software/mobile/web developer from Melbourne, Australia.

I make webapps using various combinations of Python, Django, and Flask.

I also make Android apps.

I used to make enterprise applications for Windows Mobile/Windows CE devices, back when that was a thing.

I was a backend C/C++ developer for many years.

I Make Things Go Beep

Over the years I’ve done a lot of backend Unix/Linux development, a little bit of Windows frontend development, worked on a surprising number of different warehouse management systems, and developed a lot of software for the retail industry.

But my main area of expertise is mobile development, which I’ve been doing for a while now — long before the smartphone made it trendy!

Particularly enterprise mobile development— barcoding, mobile data capture solutions and line of business applications.

I’ve developed software for mobile devices of all shapes, sizes and operating systems. Basically I work with mobile devices that beep a lot.

I started doing this around the turn of the century, in those dark days when the world was about to end because of Y2K, when mobile devices didn’t have touch screens, couldn’t play music let alone guess songs playing in bars, didn’t have much graphic capabilities, or much of anything else, including decent development tools…way back when device manufacturers thought using DOS as a poor man’s embedded operating system was a good idea. (Actually, I doubt anyone ever thought that was a good idea, but it was probably cheap…and to this day I am still amazed it’s possible to get a reliable wireless TCP/IP stack working on a mobile device running DOS!) Way back when what passed for high end mobile devices used a strange beast called “Windows CE” as an operating system.

Whether the current mobile landscape is an improvement is perhaps a matter of perspective, but needless to say things have changed a lot. If nothing else, mobile devices and development tools available now are much more powerful and (usually) less painful to work with. But for what it’s worth, after all those years working with primitive mobile hardware and equally primitive development tools, I like to think I learned something about developing for low resource environments, and providing an effective user experience given restrictions of screen size and form factor, not to mention audio hardware only capable of making basic beeping sounds.

If a girl in a bar happened to ask me what I did for a living, I used to joke that I got paid to made things go beep, before changing the subject to avoid having to explain the whole enterprise-mobility-data-capture-software thing.

Then one day a customer actually did specifically request that I modify a mobile barcoding application to change the beeping sounds generated when scanning barcodes.

I now no longer make jokes.

About anything.

Because I think the universe is messing with me…in some disturbingly ironic way…

This is my little technical geek blog, where I mostly write about things related to software development and technology, so if you ended up here while looking for erotic vampire fiction about sparkly vegetarian vampires and twinky werewolves, you’re out of luck, unless I go off on a really weird tangent, which admittedly is quite likely.

But I’ll try an keep any tangents at least somewhat technology related…with possibly the occasional divergence into the realm of stock market trading, which is one of my hobbies/obsessions, and sometimes my interests in coding and trading converge.

Apart from that deliberately vague notion that this be a “technical” blog, it is a blog of modest ambitions — just an outlet for my brain-dumps, attempts at humour, and the occasional rant. It is merely my little corner of the interweb for me to write stuff (anything!) at least semi-regularly, in the hope I might occasionally write something worthwhile.

Thanks for stopping by…hope you enjoy your stay…

Need a developer? I’m available for freelance work. Contact me here.

Colophon

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