All About Jess Barnes

I was born in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to an English mother and Australian father. I was brought to Sydney when I was one-year-old so I don’t remember my birth place, but it certainly makes for an interesting story, the usual response being “abu-what?”

Sometime after my younger brother, Kris, was born, we moved to Brisbane where I’ve lived for most of my life and definitely think of as “home”.

I met my amazing parter Lauren in early 2010 and moved to Sydney to be with her until her job allows us to move back to Brisbane, where we plan on having children.

Jess the Geek & Autodidact

I am incredibly efficient, I pay attention to detail, I am a very logical and rational thinker, I focus on the user experience, I follow best practices, I understand how the Internet works, I am an excellent troubleshooter, and I enjoy expanding upon my skills.

In the beginning

In around 1997 I first became interested in computers. I built a fan page for the comedy sci-fi series Red Dwarf using Claris Home Page, one of the earliest WYSIWYG HTML editors. I don’t recall ever hosting the website, but I enjoyed messing around with the generated HTML to see what effect it would have. I soon preferred hand-writing my own code to main control and cleanliness.

When I dropped out of school at the beginning of Grade 12, I spent the year at home teaching myself about computers. I became very familiar with hardware, operating systems, and software. I pushed the boundaries and broke things, and then worked out how to fix them. My typing speed and accuracy increased as a result of spending many hours every day on IRC (chat), and I first became interested in programming when I started learning the mIRC scripting language to increase my online standing.

Formal education

I enrolled in several TAFE courses, but dropped out due to lack of motivation and interest; I found the work to be impractical and flat-out boring. Instead I continued to self-educate myself with the help of the Internet. I went on to learn PHP and MySQL which proved to be amazing tools for developing web-based applications.

This style of learning helped me to become an amazing troubleshooter, one of my most valued skills, and something that seems to be lacking in most formally-trained people that I have encountered. To this day I have no formal qualifications and I never finished high-school, but I have never found that to be a problem.

Into the industry

I moved out of home and chanced into finding an apartment whose owner ran a small IT business; I recall only paying rent for about two weeks before I started working with him.

My duties ranged from fixing spyware-infested workstations to setting up servers and networks. I built websites and web-based software for clients and I helped renovate the owners’ houses and buildings. I also assisted/apprenticed for a friend of the owner, a quirky data-cabler, helping run and terminate tens of thousands of meters of data and security cables in commercial and residential buildings.

A new way of life

I was already very experienced with both Windows and Linux servers and workstations, but had yet to explore the Apple way of life. A colleague of mine was a Mac user and I found his enthusiasm for his computer to be quite intoxicating. The interface was so clean and intuitive, and things “just worked”, especially when compared with Windows and Linux. Before taking the plunge, I trialled a hacked version of Mac OS X Tiger on my laptop and fell in love. I’ve now owned a couple of MacBooks, an iPod, several iPhones and an iPad.

Out on my own

After approximately two years, the owner of the business, who worked a full-time job elsewhere, decided it was no longer practical to continue running the business and so he made me an offer too good to refuse. I owned and operated the business on my own for several years; I consulted to nationwide and publicly-listed companies, I built more websites and wrote more software, and even wrote an anti-phishing tool for one of the large banks.

Best practices

I became obsessed with best practices and standardisation — the “right way” to do things. To maintain my state-of-mind (and my business), I managed to find a good balance between pedantry and practicality, something I continue to fine-tune every day — I’m still amused and troubled that there is no standard English spelling for the word “standardisation”. I also started to realise and appreciate the importance of the user experience and tailored user interfaces and software workflows accordingly.

A new beginning

After running the business for nearly four years, things started to come to an end. There was a management change with my favourite and most profitable client and the new CEO and I differed on opinion. I was also becoming quite jaded and bitter with the IT service industry, always fixing the same problems rather than creating and innovating. I started focusing solely on website design and web-based software development, and eventually took a position with a group of companies doing what I love.

I’ve now built hundreds of websites as well as a software including a CMS, CRMs, a POS System, a warehouse management system and task management systems. I have also written and interfaced with many APIs.

Basically, I’m brilliant.

Jess the Libertarian

A work in progress…

Jess the Skeptic & Atheist

Also a work in progress…

Jess the Cook & Chilli-Lover

And again, a work in progress…