ABOUT

A Picture of Me

Hi! My name is Simon Painter and I code both professionally and - since it's also my hobby - for fun as well. I live in a small town in the West Midlands, not far from the Welsh Border, along with my lovely wife and two small children.

I've been coding professionally since I graduated from university in 2005, and for a hobbby since I was old enough to read my Dad's ZX Spectrum BASIC manual. I used to love those Usbourne books which were full of source code, accompanied by flashy 80s-tastic oil paintings of spaceships and monsters, as well as the accompanying source code for a game that, once entered into the machine, was somewhat less visually impressive.

In my coding life, I try to work to the principle of "lazy coding" - i.e. write code that is concise, easy to understand, and requires as little future maintenance as possible. The less time we spend maintaining the code, the more time there is for fun new coding projects!

I work predominently in C# and ASP.NET, but I've also worked a lot with NodeJS, JavaScript (ES5 and ES6+), VB6, VB.NET, ASP Classic and a host of other technologies. In all honesty I'm happy working with anything, so long as there's plenty of work to do.

I'm at my happiest with a mug of coffee, a pair of headphones playing some sort of strange music that only I seem to like, and a realy tough code problem to ponder. Possibly with a few sheets of blank paper to make notes on

I've worked previously for Cap Gemini, The Works, ProtoLabs and EuroFins Scientific, but these days I'm a self-employed contractor. I'd like to imagine myself as a gun for hire, drifting into town, cleaning up all the problems, then riding off into the sunset

Aside from coding, I'm a fairly keen amateur musician (my enthusiasm probably far outstretches my ability, however) and can often be heard torturing my wife and kids with the aid of a guitar, flute, or some other instrument.

My other interests include Doctor Who, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and drinking rather more cofee than is probably healthy for me!

If you're interested in offering me a contract, or you have a question following one of my talks, or you just want to chat, check out my Contact Me page.