I’m an IT professional with 10 years experience in managing complex network infrastructure, partner to my gorgeous fiancée Lynda and most importantly father to mine and Lynda's beautiful daughter Renee-Mae. Life has not always been easy, I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in my late teens and have battled with mental health all of my life. Over the years I have pushed for awareness around the condition and encourage anyone and everyone to speak out if you’re struggling.

From an early age, I have always had an interest in technology and electronics - specifically computers. My Grandad was always fixing electronics and I guess this spiked my interest. Even in primary school, the teachers used to come to me when they had a problem with any computers!

In high school, I became an ICT monitor which meant I would help out the IT technician at lunchtimes with tasks such as testing out new software, cleaning up keyboards, completing computer room checks etc. I was also involved in a project of ethical hacking for a new terminal server that would be used for staff and students to remotely access the school network - as part of this I found and reported some vulnerabilities which the IT technician then resolved.

Having also being interested in music and all elements of it, I learned to play the bass and later the guitar whilst in high school and became very interested in the process of recording and producing music and the technology behind it. I joined a few bands during this time and also wrote and produced my own solo music - most notably releasing a song to major download platforms in January 2012, “Do you remember you?”. I have since taught myself to play the Ukulele and a little bit of piano and harmonica. Through this interest, I went on to study music technology at college after leaving school.

Also during my high school years (and beyond) I hosted multiple radio shows across 2 internet radio stations, both now non-existent. Station 4 The Nation’s Radio and Illusion Radio. The most popular of these was a show specifically for the Punk, Oi! and Ska genres.

Pursuing my interest in technology, I grew my knowledge quickly into different areas of IT. I have worked voluntarily to help development and administer multiple websites, IRC networks (back in the day), forums and even developed a social network at one point. I have managed my own servers over the years, mainly UNIX (FreeBSD) and Linux (Ubuntu). Currently, I manage 2 Ubuntu VPS servers of my own which host this website (as well as others) and work as Apache web servers, DNS name servers and database (mySQL) servers.

After finishing full-time education, I worked briefly in a warehouse - after a few months of doing this I was contacted by an IT manager from the company where I did my high school work experience, who gave me the chance to pursue a career in IT - joining their Systems Infrastructure Team as a PC Support Engineer. I will always be thankful to Matt for giving me this opportunity, as it has allowed me to progress to where I am today.

Briefly in 2021, I ran my own IT support business “NLR Tech Solutions LTD”. This unfortunately never really took off - mainly because I was working full time as well as trying to keep it going. I was faced with no option but to close this down as my main customer went elsewhere for their IT requirements and it became insolvent. The company was finally officially dissolved in January 2023, although didn’t trade for quite some time before that.

Page last updated: 03/02/2024