About Me
Well, where do I start?
How's things? Good? Good. Things are good for me thanks.
Well, I'm Hughie, also known as Huggie, Hugster, Hughifer or Hector Ramirez. I'm a web developer currently hiding in Northamptonshire. Though I just told you where I'm hiding, so it has suddenly become a less effective hiding spot...
I'm now 21 years old! It was brought to my attention that this said I was 19, so perhaps I should update this more often!
Or I could be clever and use PHP to work out my age based on the date. Hmmm... done!
What I do
My forté is in development rather than design (and apparently not spelling), but I can do a bit of both. I'm training up my design skills at the moment. Here is a lovely chart to represent my skills.
| Naff | Oh dear | Pretty OK | Pretty good | Impressive | Ridiculous | |
| Site Design |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XHTML |
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| PHP |
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| MySQL |
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| ASP |
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| Javascript |
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| General coolness |
Error: Too high a number
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More about me
I actually started out developing computer games back in 2002 (yes I was 12). Nothing special, just simple stuff really. Eventually progressing - At 14 I was creating first person shooters, platform games etc.
For some reason, game development didn't really satisfy me though. I had started dabbling in HTML and CSS, learning the ropes, to produce a website for myself and to show off the things I had created. I ended up with Dancing Apple Games.
Yeah, I know it hurts. It's quite poor, but give me a break I was 13!
I stuck to the "graphic design name tradition" - pick a noun and an adjective or two, stick them together and voila!
I continued to learn more and more. I started to learn PHP when I bought my first proper web server and domain name (hughierocks.com!).
HTML, PHP and MySQL became my life outside of school! It' was quite a sad life to be honest, few friends, never really went anywhere but I was happy. At 15 I was creating database driven websites, with things like member's section, personal messaging systems, custom forum systems, websites with administration capabilities and more.
Time passed and hughierocks.com was due to expire. I had since developed gmhighscore.net, an online highscore table system for fellow game developers (I was still doing some game development at the time) and that was pretty much running itself. It only needed my input really to fix anything that went wrong, keep an eye on who is using it etc. Payments were taking through PayPal automatically - the site just worked.
I chose not to renew hughierocks.com. I let it go. (That and the hosting company also let go!)
I was bored one day and decided to buy yesthiswebsiteexists.com. I bought it for no real reason! I let gmhighscore.net expire (another hosting company down the toilet, and lack of funding to rebuild and continue the project).
Here we are today. 12 redesigns of yesthiswebsiteexists.com later! I'm out of school, in full time work as a professional web developer for in.house.media.
What else I do
My passion, other than Web Development, is anything to do with cars and motorsport! If I'm not at work, driving to and from work or sleeping, I'm probably doing something to my car or reading up on things other people have done.
I've got some fairly big plans for my current project, including an engine swap in a couple of years time. When my insurer decides I'm not going to use my car as a dodgem.
For those interested, you can see my project worklog (although it's rather short at the moment as I've only had this car a month) on the Club323F Forum.
