About The Staff
Charlie Briggs
My name is Charlie Briggs, I am 17 years of age, and I live in the South of England.
Computers have always been an interest of mine, since a very early age; my first computer was an IBM, and after learning how to use it from an end-user point of view, I wanted to know how it all worked on the inside, this spurred me to start programming in BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), to learn how to create basic structured programs, automate tasks, and even do my Maths homework.
Another factor which helped continue my interest was my sister taking part in a Web Design course at college, I frequently read through her course books, and even completed some of the tasks needed to pass the course, and this was when I was roughly 11 years old! Since then, I have progressed a lot; as the web is ever changing, I feel frequent progression is needed, and without continuation, your skills will be rendered obsolete. From learning basic HTML, I then moved on to XHTML, making sure I stick with the W3C standards, and updating my code to comply whenever required.
Alongside XHTML, I had been playing with JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL, I created my first CMS when I was approximately 13, which was constantly updated, and was near enough 100% secure. This is what lured me into the security side of computing; I was running my CMS on an Apache server installed on my laptop, and used DynDNS to have a fairly easy to remember domain name, beats typing in the IP address every time, I got a few friends of mine to test the security on my newly made site, and they found one, just one, tiny exploit, they were able to bypass the BBCode filters on the profile pages, but this alone was enough to get me interested into web security, and since then I've never looked back.
I am very much a Web 2.0 sort of guy, standards compliancy and the latest technologies are a must have for me, which is why, as you may have seen, our Affiliates section was created using XPath, all pages stick to the W3C standards, we use RSS for our news, our dynamic links have been rewritten using mod_rewrite for Search Engine Optimization, and we even use Adobe Flex for our administration panel; so anything Web 2.0 related, I am on it in a heartbeat.
Academically, I am a fairly average student; in GCSE English, both Literature and Language, I achieved a B grade, in Core Science, also a B, Additional Applied Science, a C, and Maths, also a C. But, in the OCR National Certificate in ICT, I passed with a Distinction, and that was all I was aiming to get out of GCSEs; I am now studying Psychology, Computing, and Media at A Level.
Jack Murray
I'm Jack Murray, 16 years old, from England.
I've been using computers since I was about 7 or 8 when I had an Amiga. Several years later I first became interested in how my computer actually worked, and I got into programming in BASIC. I quickly moved on to HTML and JavaScript, and then PHP and MySQL. I've been programming in PHP for about 3 years now, and I'm learning other languages such as Python as well.
At school I'm very much a Maths and Science person, getting an A and A* respectively in my GCSE exams. I also took the OCR National Certificate in ICT, and passed with a Distinction. I'm currently studying Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Computing courses at A Level.