Creative Restraint

Who I Am:
Andy Allan

Where I live and Work:
Scotland
Home: Coatbridge Carluke, Work: Anywhere as long as the money is good (but mainly from home)

What I Do:
Owner, Director, Janitor and Consultant for my own company, Fuzzy Orange Ltd

How to contact me:
andy[.]allan[AT]fuzzyorange[.]co[.]uk

Hobbies:
ColdFusion, Photography, Beer and Mooing For the past 29 30 31 years I've loitered with intent in Coatbridge and now Carluke, Scotland. Coatbridge, the home of Albion Rovers, The Heritage Park, and of course the Time Capsule. Carluke .... I really don't know much about it yet :) I am the owner, director, and janitor of Fuzzy Orange Ltd. When I'm not philosophising in all things ColdFusion, JRun, SVN or Trac related, I can mostly be found sipping a beer or twelve in the Mini Bar. This little a pub which although by no means local to either my home or my work, was the local drinking establishment for myself, and my partners in crime; Neil, Stephen, Thomas, Ian, and our long departed Doozer that is Colin. By long departed, I mean he's been travelling the world for the last two three four years. The fact I'm getting older, plus the fact I'm getting married (08 November 2008) means that my priorities have changed (the polite way of saying I'm under the thumb :) ) so the pub doesn't feature as heavily as it used to. Aside from drinking, I've also been known to take a few photos though not as much any more, add to my insanely large and wildy varied collection of CDs though I'm now relying on places like Napster and iTunes now, or read the latest blurbs from authors such as Harlan Coben, John Connolly, and Ian Rankin. Oh yeah, I like to travel too ... to be fair, I've not been to that many places but so far I've been drunk in:

• Helsinki, Finland
• Lisbon, Portugal
• Barcelona, Spain (twice)
• New York, USA (twice)
• Boston, USA (twice)
• Chicago, USA
• Washington D.C., USA
• Dublin, Ireland
• Liege, Belgium

I've had fleeting visits to Brussels (Belguim), and Reykjavik (Iceland). And of course, I've managed to be drunk in charge of my ugly face all over Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales. So ... where have I worked since I graduated from Strathclyde University in 1999? Well, I started off in a short term contract role at the Scottish Exhibition + Conference Centre. This was a Tech Support role that eventually turned into a full time position as the companies sole web developer. I introduced ColdFusion to the SECC, which was/is used on the companies external website (hasn't changed in 5 yearswhich has recently been re-jigged and now runs on .NET) as well as various internal applications. I was also involved in the building of SECC Tickets, the companies online ticketing system. This was/is a rather large cluster of Apache web servers, Websphere application servers, and Oracle database servers. The system now runs .NET, but I have no idea what is under the hood. In 2003 I decided to jump ship to the Babtie Group, who only 9 months later were bought over by Jacobs Engineering. Things became somwhat rocky for me after this as my position as a ColdFusion developer working to the Finance Department suddenly became some sort of hybrid .NET, Oracle Financials role ... neither of which I had ever done, but were forced upon me by the new owners. During my time at the Babtie Group, I took over the running of the Scottish ColdFusion User Group, which I've recently handed over the reigns to Stephen Moretti. In my two years running the group I gave a few talks, met an excellent bunch of people and put on a two day conference in 2005 called Scotch on the Rocks. Scotch didn't run in 2006, but did so in 2007 and 2008. In October 2005, I moved on from the Babtie Group to Learning Assistant, a small company based in East Kilbride who specialised in delivering e-Learning portfolio software used to allow colleges, councils, etc to deliver NVQ style qualifications. In January 2007, I finally decided enough was enough and went full time with Fuzzy Orange Ltd, a company I started in June 2005. Fuzzy Orange provides the following consultant services:

• ColdFusion Development (inc ModelGlue, Fusebox, Coldspring, Reactor, etc)
• ColdFusion Training
• ColdFusion/JRun Troubleshooting and Optimisation
• Subversion/Trac Training and Mentoring
• ColdFusion hosting solutions via hostway.co.uk
• Whisky tasting

You can contact me:
By email:
andy.allan@fuzzyorange.co.uk

By phone:
+44 (0)7878 730825 (mobile)
+44 (0)141 416 2990 (office)

Or via Skype: