About

Last updated Jan 2010

Shrinkrays.net is content written by me, Chris. I'm a 31 year old C# software engineer in London, concentrating mainly on the database middleware side of software - CRUD and web applications. Engineer makes me sound sound more regal and intelligent than I actually am, but I have been writing C# since around the second beta [2002] and like to feel that's my specialisation in the software industry. I graduated from UWE in Bristol in 2001, with a media related degree. I'm now making up for this with a remote-learning degree (Open University) in Computing, which concentrates on Java.

My programming experience prior to the UWE degree involved writing DOS applications in Norton, public domain applications on an Amstrad CPC 6128 (the one with the disk drive), and before that BBC Bs. The last two were BASIC, I didn't have the "pleasure" of doing assembly programming. I've had a fair amount of experience with Perl/PHP/Linux/MySQL/Bash (LAMP before it was coined) and also VB, before trying to concentrate solely on C#. I've always been database and web focused, though 2 years were spent writing windows forms applications in C# and bits of interop/COM as you always end up doing with winforms and C#.

I'm married to my university sweetheart, Fiona whom I have been with since the age of 19, with a 6-week old daughter. Most of my free time is spent at London bars and restaurants, writing software, watching films/american tv series, online gaming (mostly Team Fortress 2, CoD2 on Steam or Battlefield 1943 on PS3) or running on a treadmill to train for a 10k.

This site was originally named sloppycode.net until 2009. If you're interested beyond this little profile, try last.fm, steam, twitter.

What a stupid domain name

What are you spider man, batman or something?

My surname is Small. Could you find a decent username/online gaming name that doesn't involve (a) A derogatory reference to a midget, (b) A double entendre to a part of the body, (c) A Mr man character?!. So this domain, my email, and the gaming monikor stems back to 2004 (Mr.Shrinkray). At the age of 31 the name looks a bit childish for a site with 'professional' content, a bit like the Cliffy B name. But seeing as I paid for a 3 year domain I'm keeping it for now.

The shrinkray name comes from a device to shrink people with, which ties in with my surname being Small and it's also an item found in a famous MMO people get addicted to beginning with W that I was playing at the time; plus honey I shrunk the kids.

"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."