Andy Boot
About Me
Hello World! I’m Andy from Leeds, United Kingdom. I’m a full time and full stack senior web developer with about 20 years of experience within web development.
The Early Years
My journey started whilst I was still in high school and took the initiative during that time to attend a local city college one evening a week to learn the basics from scratch (the “World Wide Web” & HTML). Notepad & Internet Explorer 5 were my weapons of choice back then!
Before I became a professional developer, I worked in a front line service desk support analyst role for nearly 10 years. In that role I gained a great understanding of the Windows desktop & server operating systems and how networks work. I also seconded to the development team to build and maintain vital .Net systems for the company.
Now
Over the years I have progressed a little further beyond those early skills and learned to build web sites using classic ASP (Bespoke), PHP (WordPress), ASP.Net Framework (Bespoke, Kentico & Umbraco) and within the last year ASP.Net Core (Umbraco & Kentico).
I’m fairly new to the Umbraco scene with about 2-3 years of exposure to the platform. I started building with Umbraco 8 and haven’t stopped since. I can quite honestly say that I’ve used many CMS platforms in the past (more than the before mentioned list) and Umbraco is by far the best. It gives me as the developer ultimate freedom to build a website at ease and work with the CMS rather than contantly fighting against it for basic things.
Codegarden
2021 was really the first time I had heard of Codegarden to which I amongst everybody else attended for free online. I enjoyed my first experience and fed off the energy from the community even though it was all at the other side of a computer screen. I just knew back then that it wouldn’t be my last time attending.
Unfortunately for this year, I couldn’t attend in person. However, I am an attendee with a ticket for the full online experience. I am really looking forward to watching it from afar though, I’m just hoping the Umbraco organisers deliver a great show for everybody and that I learn one or two new things.
Thank you to Owain for coming up with the idea for The Secret Stage. It has helped make me feel a little closer to Denmark even though he’s in Edinburgh 😅.