About me
My name is Alan Gryniewicz and I'm a self-taught Software Developer from Bristol in the United Kingdom. I've been working as a professional programmer for over 10 years now.
I have also been a Certified Scrum Master alongside my development role. I'm very interested in getting teams of developers working together happily. A hard-working lone developer can achieve wonders. A small team with a positive attitude and synced up like a hive mind can perform miracles!
Currently I work mainly with C#, SQL and web technologies. I'm excited about learning .NET Core and diving into the crazy expanding world of JavaScript. I generally relish any opportunity to play around with new technology.
My lifelong obsession with technology began in the late 80's when I got my hands on a Commodore VIC-20. This was closely followed by a Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2. I "typed in" pages of code on both machines, although most of it never worked and the syntax was indecipherable to me at that time. I played a lot of games! Towards the end of the commercial lifetime of the Spectrum I began to discover the European demoscene and became fascinated by the quality of the demos being produced on the now aging hardware.
In the 90's I had both a Commodore Amiga A600 and A1200. Despite playing copious amounts of games, I couldn't wait to get my hands on some Amiga demos. The Amiga was arguably the flagship demo platform of the era.
I even got together with some like-minded individuals and we formed our own demoscene group called Area 51. We were not elite demo coders by any stretch of the imagination but we did release some productions we were proud of and had some fun times. Our main focus was a disk magazine called Beyond The Frontier which we created collectively.
Incidentally.. The Amiga is the best computer in the world!
I didn't realise it at the time but getting connected to the Internet in the late 90's signified the end of my scene activities. Most of the fun in the scene was trading floppy disks with contacts via jiffy bags in the post. Waiting for the postman to arrive so you could see if he had brought any new demos and intros, as well as sending off your own productions to other guys for spreading. The Internet just gave everyone access to everything overnight. In many ways this is a very good thing but it also marked a change for the scene.
Somewhere around the turn of the millennium I finally gave in and bought a PC. I'd been holding out for years as I loved my A1200 and I had it doing everything. It had an internal hard drive, 56K modem and was on the Internet.
For many years after that I was just an avid computer user and gamer.
(Side thought: That could be an issue! If I had spent as many hours in my life programming as I have playing games.. I wonder what I could have achieved!)
Then, just over 10 years ago I was offered an opportunity. I'd been employed in general office admin roles but it had been noticed that I had an aptitude for working with computers. I became a trainee Systems Administrator and Developer. This reignited my passion for creating computer software so the Developer role took over and became my full-time occupation.
Ever since, I've been busy learning new technical skills and immersing myself in technology. I still have a secret desire to make another demoscene release.
About this site
This site is an on-going collection of my thoughts and notes regarding the current state of software development as I see it. (I'm often wrong!)
I'll try to include as many of my technical notes as possible about what I'm currently learning. I may even write a few tutorials. I'll also comment about which soft skills and techniques I believe work well in a software development environment and where I think stuff goes wrong! Nothing too controversial but I reserve the right to be brutally honest.