Who is Billy?

Originally a Yorkshire lad from Sheffield, Billy, (real name "Fiaz") now lives in Leicester, UK with his wife and two kids. Web development has pretty much accounted for 99% of his working life.

Billy's career began in Nottingham, where he started working for Broadband Communications Ltd (currently known as Souk Ltd) where he was a senior developer for 6 years. During this time he developed a whole host of systems, and even had a book published entitled "Foundation Coldfusion for Flash". This taught experienced flash developers how to connect to databases using Coldfusion, this was before flash remoting appeared. You cannot get a copy anymore, but for a while, he had a book for sale in Waterstones! :-)

Whilst driving down to watch Lemon Jelly at the Birmingham Academy, he decided to leave the comfort of a salary and brave freelancing. He prepared for a quiet period where he would spend most of his time networking and pitching for work. He was wrong. There has not been a moment when he has not had work, and (touch wood) long may it continue.

The secret is the way he has built up a long list of skills, OK, you can describe him as a jack of all trades, but this has kept him in good stead. His main strength is in the way he can turn his hand to pretty much any tool, language or system in both server and client side development. Truth be told, it is what he thrives on, the challenge of taking on something new and delivering to a high standard.