Hello and welcome to my "technical" homepage. My name is Paul and I am currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, working as an independent engineering consultant. My background is in Electronic Engineering (more information), although I was always interested more in the software side of things.

Software

My main areas of expertise include "back-end" software and systems, i.e. I design the small but vital computer programs that run behind the scenes. In my experience, making a shiny graphical interface or web-based frontend really easy to use depends on having well-designed backend systems. To this end I'm an enthusiastic proponent of Unix and modular open source systems in general and C programming in particular. When tackling a complex programming task I enjoy the feeling of certainty that someone somewhere will have come across this problem before, and found a neat way of solving it that can be reused.

Two particular application areas where I have recent C programming experience are:

• Geographical Data Processing and GIS Programming
• Digital Audio and Video Processing

I also have substantial experience in PHP/MySQL/HTML web programming, Bourne shell scripting and general system administration that I can put to use in the context of any larger projects.

Broadcast Engineering

As mentioned above my background is in Electronic Engineering: in addition to computer applications I also have a strong interest in broadcast engineering in general. This dates back to my student days at Queen's Radio in Belfast (more details on this page). It's nice to take a break from programming every now and again and thus I'm also available for occasional one-off projects, regularly recurring odd jobs etc.

Contact

To summarise, I'm always interested in taking on interesting new challenges, so if you have a task that you think I could help with, please contact me to discuss rates etc.