DAVID FOSKETT

David was born in Luton, United Kingdom in the autumn of 1974. Eleven years' later he was gifted his first computer by his parents as a Christmas present in 1985, this was the fantastic ZX Spectrum 48K. ZX Spectrum 48K Initially, he was fasincated by the games and favourites include Football Manager, Match Day, Daley Thompson's Decathlon, Head Over Heels, Exolon, Cybernoid, Renegade, Paperboy and the Great Escape. He was later intrigued in how these games and computer programs worked. Typing in BASIC and machine code programs published in magazines such as Crash, Your Sinclair and Sinclair User, with the help of his Mum who had the really boring job of read them out! In February 1988, David managed to persuade his Dad to buy him a ZX Spectrum +3 by explaining how its 3" disk drive and 128k memory would further his learning (but not mentioning that games would be improved!).

However, in late 1989 his friend bought a Commodore Amiga 500 and the difference between that and the Spectrum was massive. David wanted one too. Amiga 500 Working hard as a paperboy, David eventually managed to save up enough money and in June 1990 bought one. The colourful and excellent graphics were accompanied by some great games such as Kick Off, Speedball. Menace, Lemmings, Worms, Powermonger, Populous, Stunt Car Racer, Shadow of the Beast, Xenon 2 and Sensible Soccer. The Amiga demo scene was also a fascination with some great Amiga demos being produced but unfortunately, David was never a member of a demo group but he did learn 68000 assembly language and how to program the Amiga's blitter and copper.

At 6th Form College David studied A-Level Computing and learnt a lot of computer science theory and also how to program in Pascal achieving an A grade. University of Nottingham He then went on to expand his knowledge by undertaking a joint honours degree in Computer Science and Management Studies at the University of Nottingham. Again, lots more theory was learnt in a wide range of computer science disciplines and also how to program in C, C++ and Visual Basic. All three languages were used for second and third year dissertations. David graduated in July 1997 with an upper second class joint honours degree.

Since graduating, David has been continuously employed as a Software Engineer or Technical Architect, working in many industries including internet service provision (NTL Internet), Programmer on DK2 video games development (Bullfrog Productions), fashion retail (Arcadia Group), real estate (Connells Group), military intelligence (MoD) and currently travel and tourism (easyJet). During his career David has learnt many new technologies and methodologies, from waterfall to agile, from C++ to the AWS cloud including many others; C#, .NET, WPF, Angular, JavaScript, ASP.NET and SQL. Current employer He is a frontend, backend or full stack developer and has developed web and desktop user interfaces, backend Windows or ASP.NET Core services which interface with SQL Server databases. David is a massive practitioner of SOLID principles, design patterns, clean architecture, agile principles, CI/CD and functional programming concepts in object oriented languages. Over the last 3 years' David has operated as a Technical Architect, providing technical leadership and strategic direction, architecting, designing and implementing new solutions using AWS natives services, migrating legacy technology to AWS and supporting a team of developers and managing the successful delivery of numerous projects simultaneously.

Outside of technology and computers, other interests David has include: hiking, running 5km and 10km, playing golf, skiing, supporting Luton Town FC and travelling.