Curriculum vitae

Phillip Parr, 31 Salisbury Street, Bedford, Bedfordshire. MK41 7RQ

I have four years agency experience of being a developer and over half a year freelancing for my own clients.

Programming Skills Summary: (4 & 5 with and including ), , (Strict - ), , (2 & 3), (with ), , , , (Including manipulation of feeds), s (Such as ), , ,

Other Skills: Installation and configuration of various servers, , , , , , (not for code generation), , , , , Full clean driving licence (held six years)

Current Employment

  1. Freelance PHP developer

    Full time from December 2009

    I decided to start freelancing because I wanted to have more control over the development process. From guiding clients on their specifications to choosing a CMS or creating my own hand written bespoke code. This essentially allows me to fulfil several roles as required; that of developer, technical architect, production manager, consultant etc.

    New skills gained since going freelance include a good grasp of WordPress and using it as a CMS for a full website - Sidekick Studios as one example.

    I try to leave a day a week spare in my schedule to continuously learn new skills, such as HTML5 and CSS 3. I'm also learning about Magento.

Previous Employment

  1. PHP developer at Evolving Media, Bedford

    August 2008 to November 2009

    My employment at evolving saw a more withdrawn web developer role than with Spring; production and account managers took full control of client communications leaving little input from hands on developers.

    During my time there I gained experience in several new skills; Learning to write full jQuery plugins, AJAX, JSON, SVN and working briefly with other technologies like Open Auth (OAuth).

    Working at evolving gave me my first experience of large corporate brands; working on projects such as David Lloyd and Walkabout, and a team role as the front-end creator of the YO! Sushi website (which went on to win two webby awards at the beginning of 2010). This experience is priceless and is an invaluable asset to my career.

  2. PHP Developer (starting as Junior) at Spring Digital, London

    February 2006 to August 2008

    Spring gave me my first real insight into the world of web development; many of the advanced skills I now use every day were given to me by members of the Spring team.

    Starting off as a Junior developer and progressing to a core member of the development team, I worked on, created and maintained well over 100 different sites. During my second year I took on the role of Contribute trainer - the software we gave to clients for them to maintain their websites. The list of skills I gained or improved on in this role is extensive; PHP (4 & 5 with OOP), MySQL, XHTML (Strict - W3C Validating), CSS, JavaScript (with Progressive Enhancement), jQuery, XML (Including manipulation of RSS feeds), APIs (Such as ), Cron. I was also responsible for some time quoting, technical input to the team and occasionally looking through CVs to find the best new developer colleagues.

Education

  1. BSc Software Engineering at Westminister University, London

    September 2000 to July 2003

    Before I went to university I already had a number of computer related skills - I had self-taught myself BASIC on an Amstrad from a young age, followed by QBasic during A-levels.

    The Software Engineering course taught me a great deal about the software industry; development life cycles, development patterns and practices etc. The main language we were tutored in was C++, which also included work with MFC and OpenGL. Other languages included Minix as an example of a low level language, and assembler to program embedded systems.

Recreational and life experience

Since my introduction to computers at the age of about five I've been hooked. Becoming an avid gamer right away and progressing to programming at age twelve. This continued and reflected throughout my school and university life, and carries on today in the form of web development and as a member of the social web. When I'm not programming, tweeting, reading Wikipedia etc I enjoy nothing more than a long stroll somewhere scenic, or a drive in my car.