Who are you?

I’m Alex Holt. I live in the North West of England in a town called Stalybridge. Since the turn of the millenium, I have worked for my local authority in a varying number of jobs regarding the Council’s public website, intranet and other systems.

What development do you do?

I class myself as one of the few programmers who is also able to design. While my graphic design skills don’t much encourage the creation of complicated graphics, my site design and HTML / CSS knowledge means I’m able to produce websites that are appealing with a good attention to detail. Naturally, this means creating sites that focus on Accessibility, Usability, the User Experience and valid markup. You’re looking at an example of my work now, as this is a custom designed, built and implemented style, built from scratch specifically for my Blog.

The programming side of me has worked for a majority of my time as a programmer in Classic ASP (VB Script) and PHP. As I write this, I’m looking forward to a corporate migration from Classic ASP as our “main language” to C# and the .NET framework. Though I have a great irrational fondness for VB Script, I’m really enjoying the flexibility of ASP.NET and the MVC Framework.

Why did you start this Blog?

From a personal development point of view, I really wanted to improve my writing and communication skills and this seemed like a great idea. As I learn new things I blog about them, in a bid to help me remember them or at least give me a reference point if I forget.

Where does the name Amadiere come from?

Amadiere (which I pronounce Amma-dee-air, by the way) was incarnated way back in 1999, I logged on to EverQuest and was faced with a problem – I needed to create a unique name using only alphabetical characters. I wanted a name that began with A (it’s easier to find in lists normally) and accidentally came across this one. And it stuck.

How can I get in touch with you?

Well, standard ways really. Email me amadiere@amadiere.com or follow me on Twitter: @amadiere.