Background

published: Tue, 1-Jul-2003   |   updated: Sat, 6-Aug-2016

This page provides a little background to both myself and how I created this web site, for those who are interested, or those who really are too bored for words <g>.

 

 

Who's this Julian chap?

Some history. I'm British and came over to the States to work for TurboPower Software Company. I'd worked my way up to Director of Programming. Sounds grand, eh?. What it involved was basically overseeing the entire development team for all of TurboPower's products. You can pretty well guess the types of things this involves: design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, decision making, management, etc, etc.

...and every now and again I got to design and program something for one of the products: the Deflate algorithm implementation for Abbrevia 3, that included Deflate64; generators for random distributions (including linear and normal) for SysTools; other algorithm related things.

After just short of nine years, I was promoted to TurboPower's parent company, Aristocrat Technologies, Inc, itself a subsidiary of Aristocrat Leisure Ltd, an Australian Company. I was their Director of Future Systems and was charged with laying down the methodology, architecture, design, and implementation for writing ATI's new global casino management system.

I learned a large amount about software metholodgies and casino management, but the market just didn't thrill me. I'm no gambler, even after a year there I'm still horrified about how awful Las Vegas was (yes, I was working in Vegas).

So, when opportunity came knocking in the guise of the C# team at Microsoft, I opened the door. I became a Program Manager (PM), a completely different role than I've been used to for a while. PM? Well, you have your developers and your QA engineers, and you know what they do; a PM does everything else: vision, design, community, conferences, talking to customers, writing articles, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, the role was too different. It never really gelled for me. I felt like a round peg in a square hole. Not MS' fault, by any means. They've evolved a methodology for developing products, one that I couldn't fully grok. Even now, I don't really understand how they manage to get these good products out. To me, it boiled down to development by bartering and trading. Ask me about it sometime over a microbrew.

Nowadays I'm Chief Technology Officer for a company called Developer Express. We write and market UI components for WinForms, ASP.NET and Delphi's VCL, application frameworks for .NET, and IDE tools for Visual Studio.

Why boyet.com?

Simple really. I'm an actor in my spare time (see below) and my wife is a stage manager. We first met at rehearsals for Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, she an assistant stage manager and me playing the role of Boyet, a lord attending on the Princess of France. Boyet's a fun part actually, some witty repartee, and he's a flirt and a flatterer (Dumaine calls him "honey-tongued Boyet").

So, when I wanted my own domain name and the obvious ones were already taken, I snagged boyet.com in remembrance of how we met.

Julian's Curriculum Vitae

If you're interested, you can read my résumé here.

On acting and performing

In my spare time, to unwind, I'm an actor and, more recently, a director. Anything really, Shakespeare to comedy, even musicals. Preferably something that extends me, that makes me someone I'm not, that puts me in a situation with which I'm unfamiliar, that gives me an understanding of something about which I know little. I'm probably known more as a comic actor if nothing else. See what I've acted in or directed over the last few years.

Website

This website was created and is maintained with essentially five separate software products:

Huh? Sounds like you're writing your website by hand. Why, I can hear you ask.

The main reason was to enable me to get to know HTML and CSS (and any other web acronyms) by coding it by hand, by trying silly stuff out and finding out why it doesn't work or, better, does. It took me about two weeks to convert my old boyet.com site to CityDesk using stylesheets. Most of the time was spent hacking CSS and finding out what worked (mostly by looking at other web sites that used stylesheets and that looked good). The other part of the time was spent understanding the philosophy behind CityDesk and using it to create the site you see now.

Some other reasons apply as well. Nick Bradbury of Bradbury Software was a good customer of TurboPower Software (in the sense that he helped us out a lot and I seem to remember even offering him a job at one point) and TopStyle is written in Delphi. He also wrote HomeSite (which used TurboPower's Orpheus at one stage) before selling it to Allaire (which then got bought out by Macromedia, and thence by Adobe). And I have nothing but the highest respect for Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek (although they do seem to have abandoned CityDesk). His philosophy on the environment and methodology for writing software usually coincides with mine.

A couple of further notes:

  • I have tested the site using Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla Firefox 1.0+ to make sure that I hadn't messed up the styles anywhere (or, more likely, uncovered another rendering bug in these browsers). If you're using something else and it looks screwy, please let me know. (By the way, even in my own minor use of CSS, Firefox is so much better than IE that it could be from a different planet. Just try one of my code heavy articles in IE and notice the page not being rendered properly as you scroll. Then try it in Firefox: no problems.)
  • The boyet.com web site is hosted by TDMWeb, an excellent inexpensive hosting company. I certainly have more space and features available to me than I'll be using, all for rather less than AT&T Worldnet and Qwest charge me to connect to the Internet.