My name is Jonathan, and I have over 30 years experience working with computers to make your daily workload easier.

www.mugsandgifts.co.uk

Back the 80s, I would manipulate school computers to print graphics from non-graphic printers (before the time that Windows and modern printers enabled everyone to do it).  That fired my desire to explore the world of personalising individual items which led to forming a business to produce various types of mugs and other gift ideas.

The complexity of the Engineering world enticed me to join a small fractional horsepower electric motor company in the late 80s.  In this field, my desire to learn and my tenacity to do things better saw me develop from a shop floor worker through to a supervisory role and Shift Manager before tackling Quality Control departments and then spending several years working in Engineering.

In Engineering, I helped the company transition from pencil drawings on acetate through Computer Aided Draughting using DOS-versions of AutoCAD LT from AutoDesk, before progressing to more modern Windows-versions AutoCAD and exploring other CAD packages.  My current CAD software of choice is the feature-enriched DraftSight from Dassault Systems.

As the company became more computer-reliant, I spent much of my personal time learning as much as I could about computer hardware and how they worked.  I would build my own computers at home, which enabled me to fix many computer-related problems at work.  I spearheaded the company’s Millennium Bug Assessment program, ensuring that it caused the minimum disruption possible.

My continuing desire to learn encouraged me to explore more creative computer avenues, which led to many years of learning about computer-based web languages.  Decades ago, we had simple HTML and thought that framed-based websites were awesome.  Over the years, the expansion and creation of javascript, CSS, XML, and others formed a whole new world of websites.

Websites themselves not being enough for me, my endless need to explore new things moved me into learning more about servers.  Many years ago, this began as learning about virtual servers before I’d established enough knowledge to help others host their websites on those servers running WHM/cPanel, or Webmin/Virtualmin.  Assisting clients to develop PHP-based websites, and using pre-built customisable packages such as WordPress, Joomla, OpenCart, and many others, continues to feed my need to learn.

On a personal note, my creative streak is served by novel-writing, in which field I’ve explored and learned much about novel-assisting software such as Scrivener, yWriter, Aeon Timeline, and much more.

Today, I split my time and resources over all of my interests.  If my interests also interest you, drop me a line and maybe some day we can work together to produce something that embraces your love of the creative world as it does mine.

Jonathan Rudderham
(My business website.)