Chris Abbott

Background

About Chris Abbott

Just after leaving school, my brother and I wrote a commercially released application "SoundSynth" for the Acorn Archimedes to allow generation of sounds in a way similar to the CMI Fairlight. This also included a ROM module to provide playback and manipulation of these within games/applications. Having left The Plume School at 16, I was immediately employed by them as their IT technician for two years. I was then poached by Essex County Council for my programming skills to write a data conversion/import application for Essex's rollout of SIMS, taking mainframe CSV dumps of staff and pupils. Yamaha UK offered myself and my brother a job writing demo tracks for new synths off the back of a Robert Miles Children mix we did for the DB50XG sound card - we declined however due to copyright concerns. It's on YouTube if you search! I gradually migrated into a network admin role within the MISE unit within the Essex LEA, implementing networking infrastructure, fibre, servers etc to host staff and end user training environments. The MISE unit was sold to SIMS Ltd, which in turn was bought by Capita. I spent 20+ years in Capita, gradually increasing my admin footprint to eventually include 12+ interlinked remote sites across multiple divisions spanning the UK and Ireland. My network skills grew to include expert knowledge of Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, Cisco switch and firewall configuration, Pure storage, VMware ESXi, Graylog, Azure My programming abilities have been used to develop in-house full-stack web applications to provide the SIMS Service Desk with a user-friendly way to mount customer supplied SIMS data for case triage. This included server-side Services, Powershell scripts and ASP and client side HTML/CSS and Java. I have written many applications over the years including the following platforms: BBC Basic/ASM, ARM RISC, C, C++. Delphi, Java, ASP, VBScript, ASMx86, PowerShell, Batch scripts, HTML, CSS. I also have a wealth of expertise in Excel, producing automated AD/DB integration on spreadsheets using complex formula/scripts to crunch data. In my spare time, I enjoy writing music, gardening, DIY, photography and performance Japanese cars. Currently looking for pastures new having been made redundant due to offshoring