I'm a 35 year old software engineer living in Crawley , West Sussex. I was born and bred in Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, until moving south with my last job. That job was at Criterion Software in Guildford , in Surrey, working on the RenderWare games middleware product. Criterion was then bought by Electronic Arts, and we were turned into EA Tech. I worked there until December 2010, and was responsible for a rendering technology called RenderEngine that has been used in some top selling titles from EA, such as Burnout Paradise and Skate (1, 2 and It on Wii), and am apparently well known (at least by reputation) throughout most of the worldwide studios in EA. I was made redundant in December, but Criterion Games took me on for a six month contract to write a parallel renderer for their next game, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. After leaving EA, I took a slight change of direction, and got a job in the film and TV industry, still doing coding, but with a different set of challenges to my day. I'm currently working for The Foundry on their 3D painting application Mari.
So what's it taken to get where I am today? Well, started off at Two Waters JMI, and then to Kings Langley Secondary School to do all the necessary GCSE and A-Levels. A lot of people always say they didn't enjoy school, but I found it great fun on the most part, especially in sixth form. The one bad memory that always sticks with me from school is at Two Waters, when I made a complete scene about going in one day because I hated maths with one particular teacher. Quite ironic considering what I eventually came to do...
After A-levels, I went on to get a First Class Honours degree in Mathematics at the University of Hertfordshire. Some always say that going to university is all about leaving home for the first time, but I chose to stick with the parents for a while longer - just didn't feel ready to move out at the time. I still had fun though.
After some interesting, but disappointing, job interviews towards the end of my degree, I discovered that although having a degree in pure mathematics is highly respected, unless you have some engineering practical background to go with it, it's not all that much use for the majority of jobs that ask for mathematics as a prerequisite. So, I stuck around at uni for a few more years, initially starting on a PhD in Automatic Differentiation and Numerical Optimization, finding that not quite suiting my interests, turning towards lecturing for a year (I taught Fortran 90 for a year), and then finally getting out when I realised it wasn't really what I wanted to do.
The next stages of my life I often think as the stepping stones to where I am now. Upon leaving Uni, I jumped on a plane, and disappeared to the Sunshine Coast of Australia for a month to "get away from it all". Most people at the time didn't believe I was going to do it; go half way around the world on my own, but I'm very glad I did. About a week after returning, I started my first job in the games industry, at a company called On-line Games, based in Barking in Essex. I went on to maintain a rendering engine that was used in one game, but I couldn't see a future in the company (which doesn't exist now AFAIK) so got out.
Getting out meant finally getting my arse in gear and moving out of home. I got a job at Criterion and have progressed from maintaining a software renderer and the OpenGL PC/Mac version of RenderWare 3, to maintaining the Direct3D9 version of the latest generation RenderWare 4 engine. I have gained a reputation for helping out with a lot of odd jobs among the other teams, often lending myself to documentation. Not sure if that just makes me handy, or I just like to know a little about a lot of different things. At EA, I've moved on from PC engines, to specializing on PlayStation3. And now, away from games, I am learning lots about the film and TV effects industry.
Initially renting a flat in Woking, Surrey, it was pretty obvious in short time span that it was throwing money down the drain and seeing nothing for it. So, I bought a house in Crawley (Guildford is a nice place, but it's too damned expensive to live, and so is London). So now I live half-hour's drive from the sea at Brighton, but with a growing collection of DVDs, gadgets, and of course, my piano.