About Me

My name is Joanne Hamm and I am a professional web developer from Manchester (UK). I live in Salford with my boyfriend Andy and our little kitty Pepper.

I graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a 1st in BSc (Hons) Business IT in 2008. To be honest, I originally didn’t want to go to university; I wanted to go straight into work and start my career as soon as I could. However, my friends insisted on me going to university as it would give me more potential to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with my life. Well, this didn’t happen until my final year when I started an interesting module called e-Commerce. Now, you would think that had some e-Commerce elements within it – it didn’t! However, I fell in love with the coding languages (ASP, HTML and CSS) and knew I wanted to pursue a career in web development.

Not long after I finished university (7 days to be exact), I got a job working for a publishing company in Macclesfield called Ten Alps Publishing. However, new teams have been created and I have been working in the Manchester office since May 2010.

Skills

Languages I work with:
University — I initially learnt HTML (in Notepad), quickly moving on to ASP (as that is all my university offered) and to get anywhere with syling a page, I taught myself CSS. I obviously had to use SQL and I initially had to use Oracle with no nice GUI, which meant typing everything out in code.
Employment — Once I was out of university and in to my job, I had to learn ASP.NET (version 2). My first project was to convert an ASP site into ASP.NET and as I was only shown how to copy and paste code from existing sites, I had to master the language pretty quickly on my own. For these languages I used MS SQL Server for all my database needs.
Now I mainly work with PHP sites so in the last year or so I have taught myself PHP (with hints and tips from my work colleagues) and use MySQL for the databases (through phpMyAdmin).  In the past 6 months I have been building sites using Drupal which allows me to build a site within a few days and gives the user more functionality in the admin area.

Programs I use:
Flash — I started using Flash (8 and MX 2004) in university and created a rather interesting project on the use of WiFi. Since then I have created many flash documents in AS2 (CS3) and AS3 (CS4 and CS5) ranging from pop up boxes and advert banners to interactive games and video walls.
Paint Shop Pro / Photo Shop — I use these programs to alter images and advertisements that are being used on websites I develop. I have worked more with Paint Shop Pro in the past two years but have slowly moved on to Photo Shop (currently CS5).
Netbeans — All my Drupal projects are created within Netbeans.  It allows me to start projects quickly and has a really good quick help option for PHP.
Dreamweaver — I have started to use Dreamweaver to build websites using Templates and editing existing templates to create more pages.

Contact

If you want to contact me, click here. Emails sent to me will be recieved on my phone as well as any computer so I will always have chance to get back to you.

I am also on several different social networking sites which paint a better picture of me:
- Facebook
- Twitter
- LinkedIn