Hello World

Hi there, my name is Derek Cameron, I'm a new engineer here at concrete5 Japan, Inc. I specialise in backend development but have experience with front end as well. In this blog post I will introduce myself and explain a little bit about how I started out in web development.

Early Start

When I was around 12 years old I started to dabble in CSS and HTML to create designs for ezBoard message boards, that turned to Javascript and after a year or so I began coding in PHP. Around this time I also started to manage game-servers for friends, which meant learning about linux commands. Shortly after high school, I got my first job in web development with a company called eCom Scotland, based in Dunfermline, Scotland, which focus on learning solutions. During my time at eCom, I worked on a variety of projects mainly based in ASP/ASP.net (visual basic/c# net) as well as some projects in PHP. These projects varied from large goverment agency's websites to small local businesses, as well as helping to develop internal software for management of projects/engineers, a CMS as well as an email marketing application.

After my time at eCom, I went into freelance web development and during this time I worked on sites around my hobbies, video games. That meant creating sites for organisations to manage their teams, organisations to organise their games and for players to connect with their fans via one-on-one mentoring programs and eCommerce integration. During this time I kept up with my thirst for learning and kept up the latest trends and learned more about openSource projects that would help me in my development. Although after a few years of being independent, I took up a contract with a charity and it was during this time and I wanted to go back to education.

A New Challenge

As I enjoy challenges, I wanted to do a degree which would add a different skillset to the computing and logic based ones that I had gained through self learning and work experience. So I choose Japanese Studies as my degree choice and went to Oxford Brookes University during my time there, I also did a year abroad in Japan at Kyushu Sangyo University. After my time abroad, I felt that I had to go back to Japan and since I had already decided that a career in web development was what I always wanted, I began my search for a web development position in Japan. Last year I found out about Concrete5 Japan and was really interested in the projects that they have been doing and their commitment to open source products. 

For myself as a web developer I believe that open source is the best way to move forward for web applications, so becoming part of a company that shares that ethos is important to me. It's great to be part of a dynamic environment that allows me to keep striving forward, and will allow me to share the knowledge that we learn with the world. 

I look forward to writing more of these blog posts in the future and sharing my knowledge with you.