Hi
My name is Jason Marshall. I am writing in order to introduce myself to the project in the first instance. I am aiming to contribute to the project from a development point of view, but would be interested in helping with testing and documentation. I am from Newcastle Upon Tyne in the United Kingdom and originally trained to degree level in Software Engineering in 2001. I then went on to work for the internal software house in British telecom for five years, which included roles such as developer, component designer and a little simple solution design. I worked heavily with extract, transform and load aspects of data warehousing, coding in PLSQL and Ab Initio. I would also inherently write Unix shell scripts, which I particularly enjoyed. I subsequently moved to some design and made us of the Unified Modelling Language. I have had some experience of ‘hot house' development. I also have experience with Java and C++, as well as the usual skills with HTML. I enjoy writing and working to document complex ideas so that they are accessible to everyone, hence my interest in documentation. I left IT in 2006 in order to retrain in a social science role and currently work in such a role for local government. However, I am aware that currently demand for IT professionals is high and I would like to re-enter the profession and so hope to be able to refresh my skills and experience, as well as giving something back and serving this project. I have been a long-time user of OpenOffice, having first installed it when I was handed a free CD by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Consequently, I have used OpenOffice for many years. Away from IT, I enjoy rowing, swimming and playing underwater hockey. I also love world cinema, as well as travelling in Europe. I am working through the orientation modules as well as embarking on the building process; due to having a day job and also looking to build on Windows 7 platform, this may take some time. Kind regards Jason
