A bit more about Jon...
Jon Perkins was born in Northampton, England in 1965 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. 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, travel,
complementary medicine, 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 and lives in Worcestershire.
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 Microsoft seminars (the founders were ex Microsoft employees). 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 sales ordering system for Claritas,
a Middlesex-based company who were the largest provider of consumer marketing data in Europe. He also wrote an NT user account management module for
Ranger, a schools network management product for Clifton Reed Consulting
Jon 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 1999/2000.
From 2001 Jon became increasingly involved with
providing website development services for e-Med (a medical publishing company),
as well as writing some data import/export applications in Visual Basic.net for
http://www.controlaccount.com. From 2003 he was writing a graphical flowcharting component for Economatics Education Ltd, and a language translation program for APT Transtelex Ltd as well as
various consultancy tasks.
At this time he also started working initially on part-time contract and then (by 2004) full-time for World Development Systems in Malvern. His role during
this time have been quite wide-ranging but have included:
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Sole developer of the company website, http://www.wds-global.com, written in VB.net (asp.net), and SQL Server. The website has 185 pages, and includes an online shopping cart with an https section supporting credit card transactions to a PayPal web-service.
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Mission Control, an internal management system for managing the customer database, providing staff with an interface to some of the data on the website (via a webservice), invoicing and stock control. There is also a Windows service application for data synchronisation between the company website and the local Mission Control database.
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Computer Clear, a retail software product (available in English, Geman, and Japanese) which is available on CD or by download from the online shop. This program uses homeopathic principles to help the body to resist the radiation from the computer, and has received many glowing testimonials and enthusiastic feedback from customers. Installer written in InstallAware, with a simple database provided by the SQL Server Compact Edition.
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Part-way through a complete redesign of the company flagship product (e-Lybra) which is currently being developed with Visual Basic 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, Infragistics NetAdvantage, DotNetBar. The core program is being written as a Windows WPF application, and also comprises a Windows Service application.
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Responsible for all customer technical support, whether by phone, email or in person.