About me

I guess that this is the place that I should tell you a little bit about myself and before I get into all the heavy stuff, let’s start with what really matters… football. I like nothing better than relaxing while watching Arsenal play in the English Premier League. Whoops! Maybe I was supposed to mention family here (I hope that my wife never sees this).

I have four children all of whom are grown. When they were small and they needed money for something, I used to joke with them (I’m pretty sure that it was a joke) that they were little industrial units and my monetary contribution was in fact an investment in the future. Well, so far my investment strategy has proven to be a failure and my ROI has been next to nil. However, we live in hope although I have now decided that buying lottery tickets is a better strategy. Odds of over ten million to one now seem mouth watering compared to my little ‘industrial units’ coming up with the goods. Seriously though, regardless of all the vainglorious nonsense that I could enunciate here (extremely smart, highly motivated self-starter, experienced in IT and in business, etc.), I would have to say that my family are, by far my greatest and most important achievement. I am an extremely smart, highly motivated self-starter, experienced in… Wow! This cut-and-paste saves so much time on typing.

Aside from my family, my other passion is sitting in front of my computer educating myself further on Javascript, jQuery and other web tools. I enjoy the heuristic style of learning, trying something out to see if it works. Very often it doesn’t initially, but the real thrill comes when everything eventually falls into place. Most of my projects are small snippets that I work on locally (rather than major systems that are published to the internet).

That is why the Shopify project intrigued me. It gave me a specific target and allowed me to learn a new platform as well as getting to grips with a new language (Liquid). Although I am not expert in this area, I have come a long way in a short time and am confident that I could, even now without the benefit of any structured Shopify training, deliver a good service to clients.

I spent most of my working life working in the IT industry and in a management position in the insurance industry and spent seven year running my own company. Throughout the years, excellent delivery of service was a constant and fulfilling factor in my working life. Also my notion of a customer changed from the traditional one of purchasers of your product/service to everyone that you interface with, be they superiors, subordinates (if applicable) and peers. Facilitating others in the company to do their job well is an important ingredient in delivering a quality service to the end-user.

A number of years ago I got the opportunity to fulfil a lifelong ambition and returned to college where I completed a degree in business (majoring in economics and finance) and followed that up with a Higher Diploma in Software Development (first class honours). I have always had an interest in economics, probably because it suits my mentality. It is the antithesis of rote learning and is something that can be worked out from first principles. While a lot can be achieved on your own, college gave me an opportunity to contextualise a lot of my self-learning. The Software Development Diploma gave me a chance to pursue my other love. Here I was exposed to object orientation techniques using Java as well as web development (HTML, Javascript, AJAX, CSS, PHP and mySQL). I have since taught myself jQuery and further sharpened my web skills by using MOOCs.

So that’s me in a nutshell. But I guess the important question is, what could I bring to Shopify as a Theme Specialist? For me, problem solving is fun and a happy customer always provides a great buzz. Learning more about the platform and digging deeper into certain aspects would be enjoyable and is probably something that I could see myself doing even if that were to be outside of working hours.

In summary, I feel that my skillset would be of benefit to Shopify and that I would be a valuable addition to your team of Theme Specialists. Also, I believe that I have the proficiency and aptitude to progress to other areas within the group where I could make an important contribution to the organisation.