I was born on 24th October 1980 (I’m thus a scorpio-monkey) and I am the eldest child of Colleen – a GP – and Clive Hudson – a Civil Engineer and Project Manager. I have a brother, Robert, who lives in London and is a successful Internet Software Consultant.
I live in Reading, UK, with my fiancée, Marion, who’s a top-secret scientist from the South of France. We are planning to get married in the summer of 2012 on the beach near La Rochelle.
After a career in Chemistry 2003-2010 I felt that I’d reached the end of what I wanted to achieve and that it was time for something that for me had been a hobby and a passion outside of work: the web. In 2008 I started a web design course entitled Masters CIW Designer via distance-learning and in the summer of 2010 I changed career to become a front-end web developer at Heath Wallace here in Reading.
My interests are running, web-design, juggling, music, photography and cinema. I also love to cook deserts and drink beer.
Why Blog?
This blog is a place where I write about what I am upto, what interests me, and it’s also a place where I can try new things out. Being a developer you might expect me to try things on a private site and then push to the live (public facing site) when everything has been tested and issues ironed out. But what the hell, this is for me and I’m not expecting many people to read it and least of all anyone on IE6;)
Now that I’ve finished my Masters CIW Designer I want to continue the lifelong learning process by teaching myself other things. The current areas of study are:
- How to build custom themes in WordPress
- Increasing the speed of websites through optimisation, minification and concatenation
- Learning jQuery and Javascript
- Reduce size of CSS files by having a sound methodology when writing it
- SASS to compartmentalise and improve the efficiency of CSS
- Utilising the HTML5 Boilerplate as a sound base for all new web projects.
Sometimes I blog about running and other things too.
Why bigandy?
In the final year of my university course I joined the Manchester University Canoe Club and on the end of year trip to go Kayaking in the French Alps. There were two Andys, Army Andy and Big Andy.