The Story So Far..

Overview

John Perkins was born in Northampton, England and was educated at Spratton Hall School (where he was the head boy), and at Oakham School in Rutland from where he obtained 8 O levels. At 16 he dropped the "h" in John for no adequately explained reason. Attendance at Nene College (Northampton) resulted in a BTEC Diploma In Technology (Engineering) and a BTEC Higher Certificate In Business & Finance. After working in the family engineering business for a few years he decided to take up a position as a trainee programmer in order to get a passing acquaintance with computers. That was in 1986 and he has been happily cutting code ever since!

Jon's many interests include cooking, reading, writing, jazz music, computers, gardening, and new age philosophy. He has also, in the past, enjoyed treading the boards in amateur dramatics productions - particularly A Passage To India (E. M. Forster) and Children's Day (Keith Waterhouse), neither of which he can now remember even the plot to. He also wrote a review for the Northampton Youth Theatre Company in 1983 and, although there were about two dozen members, recalls that he seems to have taken the lead in most of the sketches himself (oops).

He is married to Alison, a Natural Health practitioner, and they live in Worcestershire. They have two cats, Mischa and Maisie.

Career Summary

Jon has worked in software development since 1986, when he was part of a trainee intake for the Anglia Building Society (prior to the merger with the Nationwide). After 18 months of COBOL programming on an ICL mainframe, he consciously made the decision to move over to PC development and left to work for the Open University where he spent a year writing course modelling software in Clipper. He was subsequently asked back to the Nationwide Building Society and continued writing Clipper-based systems for the next three years, in this case predominantly workload analysis software for the Organisation & Methods department. In 1993 he moved into the main Technology Development division and specialised in writing client/server systems using Visual Basic, Windows NT and SQL Server.

After a couple of years of providing ad-hoc consultation and programming support to external companies, Jon became an freelance developer in 1996. At this time, he is proud to have become an associate developer with The Mandelbrot Set (International) Ltd, a Windows-only software house noted for the quality of their technical staff and of their high-profile involvement in Visual Basic seminars. The Mandelbrot Set has since become a part of Charteris plc.

An initial request by EXE magazine (arguably the premier software development magazine in the UK at the time) to write an article on three-tier software development rapidly led to an invitation to join the writing team for the Microsoft Press book Advanced Microsoft Visual Basic 5, and subsequently to write a regular Visual Basic column for EXE. A second edition of the book - Advanced Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 - followed.

Since going freelance Jon has written the data and business level tiers for a new sales ordering system for Claritas, a Middlesex-based company who are the largest provider of consumer marketing data in Europe. He has also written an NT user account management module for Ranger, a schools network management product for Clifton Reed Consulting.

Predominantly though he continued working in a freelance capacity for the Nationwide Building Society on a variety of software development projects from 1998 through to 2001. These tasks were initially to provide Y2K analysis and upgrades in the lead up to the year 2000. Like many companies at the time the Nationwide took the opportunity to rewrite some of its older PC-based systems using the newer development tools and platforms. Among the systems that Jon solely rewrote from scratch were a Windows 3.0-specific system that pulled data from a mainframe to automatically produce letters, a system that maintains a data warehouse of the Society's mortgage book for the preparation of automated and ad-hoc reports to internal departments and other organizations such as the Building Societies Ombudsman and the Council of Mortgage Lenders, and a system that stores all of the details of all of the securities held against corporate loans.

Post-Y2K saw a conversion of an existing Microsoft Access system to use SQL Server to increase scalability and the creation of a tactical tool to calculate daily interest on mortgage accounts. Subsequently he wrote a generic utility service that passed XML-based requests for data into and out of the Society's ICL mainframe - a service that is now being used by several key Society systems. Finally he designed the architecture and security models - as well as being part of the Visual InterDev development team - for an intranet system that is used in the branches to convert mortgage accounts from one type to another.

During his time at both Claritas and Nationwide Jon was also extensively used in a consultancy capacity; being asked to provide technical or troubleshooting assistance to other development teams. As a freelance writer and author, Jon also occupied a part-time position as Technical Editor for the MSDN Component Resources site during its existence in 2000.

In 2001 he acquired ME (aka Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and had to take some time off to recover, although he did perform some website development services for e-Med, a medical publishing company. From 2003 onwards he was able to pick up the pace and undertake significant development projects again, this time for Economatics Education Ltd and also for APT Transtelex as well as various consultancy tasks. Since 2005 he has considered himself to be free of the ME, and is a happy bunny again.

And now...

Jon is Head of Software Development at World Development Systems Ltd, a company leading the way in bioresonance technology.