Please tell us a little about your web story!

Self taught PHP developer through high school in England, did some college and university grade courses, very quickly learnt they didn't teach me anything. Went for an interview whilst still studying, on a Thursday for an in-house website developer, boss told me if i dropped out he'd hire me on Monday. Needless to say i started work on Monday at 19 and have never looked back.

From there i went to Precedent, who a few years later sent me to Australia in 2012. 10 years from dropping out of college i'm a Web Developer, having been a front-end developer, developer, senior developer, technical consultant and now herding the pack!

I see a lot of organisations giving way more interest in user based design. Actually putting some research into the designs an agency produce. I saw it a lot with bigger agencies, but it's now filtering down to medium projects which is amazing.

What do you think the biggest challenges will be for the future of our industry?

Talent, keeping up with tech and misconceptions of what we do. The amount of times my grandparents ask me to fix Microsoft Word for them. A website developer is just someone on a computer.

How do you describe what you do to people who aren’t in the industry?

As a developer I described it very simply as building a house. You have someone who draws plans, and someone who puts up walls, runs electric cable, does plumbing. As a developer, I put up walls, did some plumbing maybe, maybe i did some electrics.

As an architect I described as drawing the house.

A web developer i just explain is a project manager who used to be all the roles and helps the roles do what they need to do more efficiently.

What’s something that you’d want to jump in to learn as a junior again?

PHP/HTML. Sitting in the "computer room" back in the day making some crazy CMS was the most exciting time.

What do you believe a national body like the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) could do to elevate our industry as a whole?

Get into colleges, schools, talk about what we do, how to get into what we do, why it's important. Get into other forms of media, maybe YouTube and discuss the different roles, how to contract an agency, how to build a brief, help clients to help us so we can better help them

What are the things you love about Localhost?

Community, pizza choices are always on point, and the openness to try something new. Enthusiasm shown by the team is out of this world

Aww. That's too kind, Simon. Thanks for the chat and for being a part of Localhost. You rock!