Huh?
This is the online portfolio of one Andrew Hayward, subject of the British empire, resident of New York London (with working rights across Europe and the US), and graduate of the University of Bath with a BSc (Hons.) in Computer Science.
You'll have to excuse the random third-person point of view... it seems that everyone else is doing it, and it makes writing this that much more interesting.
You can download a CV (PDF) if you want an alternative (and somewhat more succinct) form of this site.
Buzzword Central
Alternatively, "the bit that you read, see lots of words and phrases you're sure you've heard at one point or another, and instantly hire us on the spot".
Despite the fact that Gratuitous Pawn is armed with some vague sort of design sense, and a reasonable grasp of Adobe Photoshop, he actually has a rather more technical background, and can develop systems from the root up (no pun intended!). He has worked a great deal with LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) environments, and has built many sites around this technology. As well as MySQL and PHP, he has used MSSQL and Perl to achieve similar ends. As regards Perl, he has a fair bit of experience using the Catalyst framework, having worked directly with the ShadowCat team.
That said, we are just as comfortable on the client end of the setup. With extensive experience of HTML, CSS (shall we throw in a couple more acronyms here, like DOM and XML) and JavaScript, we can build complete solutions by hand to meet all sorts of accessibility and conformity guidelines that nobody really cares about anyway!
Combining HTML and JavaScript would seem to be the next big thing, with Web 2.0 seemingly right around the corner. Fear not, because we have that under control too. Not one to miss out on all the fun, we've even mastered AJAX... yes, that random term that seems to get the marketing types flustered and the technical bods confused. We don't really know what it means either (we thought it was a Dutch football team), but we can do it regardless!
When not sitting on a web server making websites, we are also fairly adept at such things as Java, C#, VB.Net, and a variety of other obscure languages that even we can't remember the names of.
Contact
You can email us at andrew [at] gratuitouspawn [dot] co [dot] uk, or alternatively talk to gratuitouspawn with Y!IM/AIM/iChat (other instant messaging clients are available).
Rates and stuff
It's entirely possible that you want to join the Gratuitous Pawn empire, and work with us on some project or other. And that means you may well want to know how much such a venture is going to cost you. Rates are negotiable, depending on exactly what it is you're wanting us to do, and for how long, but as a general starting point, it's usually somewhere around £25-£35 per hour.
On with the show
Some more recent projects...
Also, largely in some sort of alphabetical order, but otherwise kinda randomly...
Oh yes...
Just in case you're wondering if Gratuitous Pawn does actually have any semblance of a life, worry not &ndash we do actually have a reasonably long list of things not involving computers at all. On a good day, this might include things like mountain biking (sometimes even venturing out on to the tarmac!), football (soccer to some), reading, and listening to a great deal of music.