mooch labs

I provide open source writing, consultancy and training, specialising in:

• PHP - beginner and advanced courses, Zend Framework, bespoke application development
• Drupal - installation, configuration, customisation, custom module development
• Ruby on Rails and Ruby programming
• Open source strategy, development tools and frameworks, bespoke training, software evaluation
• Technical authoring - articles, books, manuals, howtos

I also have skills in the following areas:

• Content management systems
• ASP web programming
• Prolog programming
• Python scripting
• MySQL (and SQL more generally)
• Natural language processing, inference, artificial intelligence

I've been involved in computing since 1992, and have worked as a web developer for four years, a technical author for one year, and as an open source developer and advocate for three years (as part of OpenAdvantage).

See my LinkedIn profile for recommendations.

Please contact me if you are interested in any of my services.

Bespoke training

I provide bespoke training courses on a variety of topics, such as PHP programming (I am a Zend Certified Engineer), Apache configuration, Tomcat configuration, and Ruby on Rails. Where possible, I make my training materials available under a Creative Commons license.

Samples:

• Training materials for an Apache and PHP installation and configuration course, which are available under a Creative Commons license.
• Training materials for a Tomcat installation and configuration course, which are available under a Creative Commons license.

Technical writing

I have written technical articles on a variety of subjects, for example:

• Review of content management systems, for OpenAdvantage.
• Why you should care about open source, an article for the British Computer Society's Annual Review 2006

Programming

AxleGrease (Ruby On Rails On XAMPP)

This project is an add-on for XAMPP which provides a quick and easy Rails environment for Linux. It is hosted on RubyForge.

s33r

This is a Ruby library for working with Amazon S3, an internet file storage solution accessible via web services. s33r is hosted on RubyForge.

FlickrLilli

This is a search engine for Flickr, which allows search by Creative Commons licenses. Find it at http://flickrlilli.org.uk/. (By the way, I wrote it on top of Ruby on Rails.)

Elsewhere

I maintain a personal blog at http://townx.org/.