About

27smiles is the public blog of Richard Grundy.

I’m a computer science student in his final year at Aberystwyth University.

My folks live in Birmingham and where I live normally out of term time but for my final year I’m living in Aberystwyth during the summer (as well as term time) with my girl friend Kerry (who just got a 1st! in her degree - so proud).

I have also just completed a year in industry working mainly as a web developer but did various other technology related stuff (voIP, Windows/Linux administration,  mySQL management, customer service).

I have a keen passion for all kinds of computer development, but mainly web development. I started learning PHP around 8 years ago, before moving into C, C++, VB, Perl and various other languages, in 2002 I started to develop a lot with the .NET framework mainly using C#, VB.net and also around this time I started to learn Java (although it wouldn’t be until university that I started doing lots of Java).

I’ve been actvility doing web development with PHP (on and off) for the past 8 years but it wasn’t until 2005 that I started to really get back into more web development and less on the system side.

In the past year or so I’ve started to branch off into using frameworks more (mainly cakePHP, Ruby on Rails, Merb and Django). I can now state that I’m fluent with Ruby, PHP, XHTML/HTML, CSS, Javascript and the frameworks: CakePHP, Ruby on Rails and Merb.

About 27smiles

I wanted to come up with a usual name when finding a domain for the blog, but now a days anything that’s remotely relevant to anything or short is normally taken so like various places (37signals, 43things, etc) I’ve taken to prefixing a name with a number. In my case the number is Kerry’s birthday the second part…well I’m unsure why, think it just flows…maybe. Who knows? Smile!

At the moment this is just a blog for myself to post anything that interests me but one day I might turn this into a development company (or maybe using a different name, still want to start one though) but for now any development I do will most likely be put as 27smiles.

Me the developer

I’m normally open for small jobs as I have other commitments what with university work and other projects, but just drop me an email and I might be free.

I welcome any questions people have and I am always willing to help people who are struggling with a problem, drop me an email. I can also normally be found on IRC in irc.freenode.net - #merb or #datamapper as richguk.

Social me

See contact page

also Steam (Valve) user: RichGuk