About

Old Floppy

When drainpipes ruled and disks were floppy!

I started out being thrown into the deep end of a trading floor in the middle of london's financial district in the early 90's. Fronting up to six hundred volatile brokers was a baptism of fire.

We had to deal with massive IBM 80x80 machines with five and a quarter inch disks on a cabling system that ran under the floor and would ensure that if anyone wanted to move desks, it involved at least five engineers and a few hours of overtime.

Into the unknown!

As technology pulled away during the early nineties, so did banking technology.

Open-cry trading was fast disappearing in place of faster, more manageable computerised trading and matching systems. Once hidden away in a cold and noisy frame room surrounded by whirring fans and cooling systems for the predominantly voice systems, we, the IT department were brought out into the daylight and had a predominant hand in how the trading floors looked and ran.

Once a club for geeks, we now had smarter grads joining our team, and management consultants gew in numbers. We started to need to deal with the ebb and flow of electronic trades from various exchanges around the world. Still a mainly Unix/Windows environment, we'd seen off the earlier Novel/DOS machines for more powerful x86 processors and the emergence of VB programming languages made creating ad-hoc, custom made applications to manipulate the data and trade more efficiently.
NY Trading Floor
Banksy Girl

Someone broke the system!

I remember sitting on a trading floor for where I worked at the time and looking around the trading desks. They had exotic names I could barely say let alone comprehend, they were all complicated methods that ultimately achieved the same goal and that was to take shitty debt, roll it up, repackage it and give it a good rating that was then sold on.

It was this method of provisioning debt that ultimately led to the financial crash in 2008 and the end of my IT career in the city. I had still been on the trading floor mainly looking after algorithmic trading bots automated exchange trading systems. 

By now the IT department probably had more sway than the actual trading desks, for sure there were more of us.

But the seachange in the city gave me a signal to say goodbye to nearly fifteen years. It was a great time to be alive, and met some of the most hilarious and completely crazy people. Picked up a tonne of knowledge and dealt with some of the most stressful situations that would put me in good stead for my future roles!

Do what?

I had been travelling through South America in 2005, created a webpage and blogged about my experience, before the influencer tag was even awake, let alone out of bed. I was picked up by a couple of magazines and put into print, and managed to garner a few hundred 'followers' to my website blog posts.
Fast forward ten years and I was married, had a family, running four businesses including a hotel and living on the Mexican Caribbean coast.

How on earth I got there still baffles me, but if you're interested you can see a brief timeline here.
...brief timeline

.tech bit

I started using Dreamweave at the time, but was horrified by the amount of code it bloated a site. Just a simple Heading would create reems of code. Back in the day I wasn't too concerned about speed, it was just a real pain in the ass to go through it to see where the edit needed to be made. Then when it all went wrong, It was a real problem to fix, so I sat down and picked up HTML markup and designed my site with a book and notepad.

Today

I still run two eCommerce businesses, I help out small start-up companies and am loving the work I'm doing here designing websites and empowering the small entreapreuner in bringing their brand to market.
There is such a desire for indeviduals to create and build a business, if you have the belief and will-power, you can turn your dream into reality.
I don't accept that technology should be there to hinder or halt your progress or journey, it was designed and invented, to help. So if you're finding the hurdles a little much, if the thought of building a brand through your own website, but don't know where to start, send me a message. Let me help you get up and running and in front of the competition.
I have a healthy database of people on hand from designers, copywriters, editors, photographers, accountants, you name it.
There's no excuses anymore.

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