About Brett...

Vital Statistics

Real Name: Brett Hargrave Taylor

Gender: Male

Born in: February 1981, Lower Hutt, Wellington

Marital Status: Single

Website Portfolio

I have been working with PHP for nearly 3 years now, in my spare time and during employment. I have designed and programmed many sites. Here are a few of my favorites:

ResponsibleTourism.org.nz - was given content and told to put a placeholder website together. I made this instead.

TheNext.org.nz - Took design, converted to HTML, CSS. Used Dreamweaver.

Global Education Centre - Took poorly-pre-sliced design, recreated HTML and CSS using Dreamweaver.

E-Zebra.co.nz - Took design, converted to HTML, CSS, programmed crossbrowser JavaScript from scratch, and programmed user management and subscription functionality with PHP and PostGres.

Brezelmania.co.nz - took design, converted to HTML, CSS, and programmed shop database scripts to customer specification.

Instinct - took design, converted to HTML, CSS, and implemented page centering JavaScript.

Tardus - took design, converted to HTML, CSS. Also programmed simple simon mortgage calculator in flash - it is a client to a SOAP webservice which was written by a third party.

Envirogroup - took design, converted to HTML, CSS, entirely with Dreamweaver.

About My Geekage (from my cv):

I'm mostly self-taught in Web Design and programming. I was programming in Basic on the Commodore 64 when I was 9 or 10. I got my first PC and for the first time seriously picked up programming in QBasic (1993), then QuickBasic (1995), then Visual Basic 5 (1996). I ran a BBS called TTOE BBS in Napier for just over a year, during which the Internet came to New Zealand. I ran the BBS till it was the second-last in Hawkes Bay.

I first started learning HTML one school holiday in 1997 before I had Internet access - found some HTML tutorials on a magazine cover disc. When I got my first dial-up connection I made my own websites. I've been making websites ever since. I started learning Flash when I found Flash 3 on a magazine cover disc.

Wanting to do Internet stuff professionally, I attended a course at NCMT, and used this time to enhance my design and flash programming, as Flash 5 came out that year. In my spare time I contributed tutorials and open source movies to Flashkit.com, and participated in their forums, and left just before Internet.com bought it out. Wanting to do more advanced web pages, I picked up PHP extremely quickly during my spare time at Cybernomad, an internet café, and started Webfroot, a website where we talk about internet stuff and programming and junk. NCMT called me back and I taught Flash for four weeks, which I enjoyed thoroughly.

Also during my spare time at Cybernomad, I created a PHP script called Shoutbox based on an idea I saw on the Internet. Shoutbox turned out to be popular beyond my wildest imagination. In 2002 I created Mood-o-Meter, another PHP script. I also started a personal weblog here at glutnix.com

Something interesting about my computing habit is in 2001 I decided to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. The fastest typist in the world uses this layout, which has the vowels on the left hand home keys and the most common consonants on the right hand home keys, with more often used keys nearer the home keys. I am now fluent in Dvorak and use it daily. Don't worry about me not being able to use standard Qwerty keyboards; I can still use them, although at a very slight speed decrease. Dvorak is not reliant on custom keyboard hardware, but instead is easily changeable on most modern computers, including Windows95+, Mac8+, and Linux, so don't worry about having to buy me special keyboards :)

I found employment with my friends at Instinct, which they had just formed, but retained my Internet café job during the nights to keep a steady income.

I then got a job in April 2003 at Dev-Zone as a PHP Web Developer, where I currently work three days a week.