About me…
I am passionate about my various hobbies and always like to be doing something interesting. From a young age I became interested in Electronics after watching my father build interesting circuits. I then went on to study Electronic Engineering and worked in the field for 5 years before joining the IT revolution. Building and installing PCs was a lot of fun back in the 1990s. Electronics is now my main hobby.
Having a beautiful wife and daughter doesn’t afford me much time to pursue my hobbies, although I do take my camera when we go on holidays or anywhere local – even walks in the park.
Some of my hobbies are true hobbies while others are really support hobbies, for example designing a Microsoft Access database to catalogue all my electronics components, or writing a photo management application to view and manage my photos. This website is a hobby – I enjoyed re-leaning the latest version of WordPress and discovering all the plugins – pulling it all together and styling it.
My main focus in electronics is digital systems, although I also find some aspects of analog electronics fascinating. When I studied electronics back in the 90s, microcontrollers were complicated devices that required a deep understanding of operation, memory organisation, and assembly language. You had to allocate memory, manage the hardware stack, and handle interrupts manually. Programming was a meticulous process, demanding precision and careful planning to ensure efficient use of limited memory and processing power. I used the Microchip PIC 8-bit series of microcontrollers in some of the products I designed, and writing code for them was a lot of work. See the firmware I developed for the MCCS for an example.
Today, there is a wide variety of microcontroller development boards accessible to hobbyists, all of which can be easily programmed via USB with high-level languages, abstracting the complexities of the hardware implementation from the user.
Photography is another hobby that I am passionate about. Whenever I go out with my family to interesting places, whether for a short bike ride around the neighbourhood, a day out to the countryside, or abroad on holiday, I always take one or more cameras with me, looking for interesting subjects and scenes to capture. My focus is on landscape photography, animals, and panoramas. I also enjoy post-processing the photos using various software packages. See my galleries and panoramas for examples of my work
Studies and Experience
Details of my career and achievements can be found on my LinkedIn page. My main areas of study are:
Batchelor of Technology (B. Tech), Electrical Engineering – PE Technikon, South Africa, 1993
- Mathematics
- Electronics
- Digital Systems
- Electrical Engineering
- Power Electronics
- Control Systems
- Electronic Communication
- Industrial Technology
- Project
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) – Microsoft, 2000
- Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
- Windows NT Server 4.0
- Windows NT Server 4.0 in the Enterprise
- Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0
- Microsoft TCP/IP on Windows NT 4.0
- Networking Essentials
Postgraduate Diploma (P. G. Dip), Computer Science – Birkbeck, University of London, 2007
- C++
- Object Oriented Programming with Java & C#
- Software Engineering – Object Oriented Analysis and Design & UML
- Database Management
- Data Structures
- Computer Architecture
- Operating Systems
- Neural Networks
- XML
- Networks
- Information Systems
- Social Implications
- Writing, Formal & Natural
Professional Certificates
My Certificates page contains all my professional certificates.