For anyone who wants to know here’s my CV. I’ve been involved in IT for 50 years now; starting in the summer of 1976. I’m in the process of documenting my experiences over the decades. Meanwhile, here’s a summary.
Latest update – July 2025
After my birthday last July I decided to retire. It’ll take a while to wind down completely.
I’m still a full stack web developer, specialising in WordPress.
- I still maintain / host a couple of sites; hosting with SiteGround.
- and have developed a few new ones recently:
- one for my son in law Mike, an arborist in NSW, Australia: wicksystrees.com.au
- one for my golfing buddy Dave, a roofer: Paynes-Roofing.co.uk
- and I revamped the Rowlands Castle Village Fair’s website this year: RCVF.org.uk
- I was the creator of WP-a2z – the dynamic API reference for WordPress core, plugins, themes and blocks
- But I killed it off earlier in the year.
- Therefore I no longer catalogue WordPress blocks,
- nor block based, aka Full Site Editing (FSE), themes.
- I focus most of my efforts playing golf at Rowlands Castle Golf Club; seniors competitions, seniors matches – home and away, and the Wednesday afternoon roll up, as well as a few games with my wife.
- I still attempt to organise the WordPress Portsmouth Meetup, but we don’t meet as regularly as we used to.
- My latest book, Stupidly Brilliant, published last year, is as popular as its predecessor, Seriously Bonkers (2018).
- seriouslybonkers.com, the supporting website, now contains over 600 images generated by AI for SB bigrams, with over 4000 entries in total.
- I’m still maintaining my oik plugins
- the original home of lazy smart shortcodes
- many of which are now enabled as blocks
- I don’t sell premium plugins any more
Technical skills
- Current:
- WordPress (core, plugins and themes), PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, Genesis theme framework, MySQL, Git, SVN, PHPUnit, problem determination.
- Some:
- ReactJS, REST API.
- Previously:
- Drupal, C/C++
Background to my years of self (un-)employment
I formed my web design and web development company ( Bobbing Wide ) soon after retiring from IBM, where I’d developed software for 31 years.
Originally I focused on developing websites for small to medium businesses, mostly using Drupal and WordPress.
In 2011, I started developing WordPress plugins using the brand name of oik-plugins.
Many of the plugins are aimed at web designers, developers and power users.
There are now over 60 plugins, including oik, oik-nivo-slider, oik-weight-zone-shipping and the plugins that are the power behind wp-a2z.org: oik-fields, oik-types, oik-plugins, oik-themes, oik-shortcodes.
And for the 2016 upgrade: oik-ajax, oik-batch, oik-ms.
Self employed since 2010
Working as Bobbing Wide and oik-plugins:
- Develop and support a range of advanced WordPress plugins, both bespoke and Open Source.
- Develop and support bespoke themes for customer sites.
- Contributor to WordPress core
- Develop and support the WordPress Dynamic API Reference suite of sites
Earlier career – June 1979 to October 2009
Senior Application Developer / IT Architect at IBM Global Services
- e-business integration specialist since 2003.
- Industries: Communications, Retail, Banking (FX), Energy and Utilities.
- Multi platform development.
See also LinkedIn profile or read my IBM CV
Other Interests
Golf, Progressive Rock – especially Caravan, Cycling, Cats, Real Ale.
I live in Rowlands Castle with my wife Susan, and black and white cat Sergeant Bramble.