Age 11 Paul decided to be a Systems Analyst, that’s an old fashioned name for do-it-all IT consultant - his hands have rarely left a qwerty keyboard since. Academically Paul holds Bsc and MEng degrees from UMIST University, that was followed up ten years later with another Masters degree in AI and Robotics. A PhD in Artificial Intelligence has been on the cards twice, but the thought of four more years in poverty was always sobering!

A real IT career began as a sponsored student in 1989 working on Satellite Communication equipment for the UK’s Defense program. Since then he has worked for many big name IT consultancies including Andersen Consulting (Accenture), Deloitte and Touche and EDS. After leaving a full time position with Andersen Consulting in 1995, Paul has been an independent consultant able to cherry pick positions. This allowed almost all roles to be on larger Enterprise Scale Applications and every project to require: OOA/OOD experience, multi-tier/layered designs and SQL (DB2, Sybase, Oracle, or SQL Server).

Technology wise Paul works only on Microsoft .Net projects; he has used .Net exclusively since Beta 1 in March 2001 and is often called a .Net guru, but Paul believes that no one can ever be guru in .Net given the size of its Framework. He moved from Clipper5/ dBase IV to PowerBuilder to Java Application Servers before becoming enamored with .Net.

Paul maintains a technical web log http://dotnetworkaholic.com, tries to stay current in technology and presents nation wide on .Net topics. He would love to present and write more, but his free time is shared with other hobbies such as cycling and autocrossing.