Hello!

I'm Chris, and welcome to my humble professional profile.

Between:

• a BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol,
• half a BSc in Diagnostic Radiography from LSBU,
• over 5 years working as an administrator and project co-ordinator for mental health services in the NHS,
• and experience in a bunch of odd jobs between all of these

I have a breadth of knowledge to draw from to help you in whatever good deed you need doing.

While not an out-and-out programmer, I've made a number of things in my time as an admin to make a lot of very diligent, competent nurses tell me things like "you're the best admin we've ever had", "you're in the wrong job", and "is that another cup of coffee?". I've built a lot of spreadsheets from scratch in Excel, picking up good habits in conditional formatting and lookups, and exploring possibilities with VBA, Forms integration and PowerAutomate to make training registers, laptop trackers and admission histories.

My general philosophy in environments where I have to communicate with many stressed, anxious and occasionally hostile stakeholders is that there's a lot we don't know about another person's life. The goal is not to prove yourself right, or make someone leave (usually) - it's about making sure they understand that you understand.

I think a lot about accessibility (I have tried to ensure this page complies with ARIA standards), and user experience in general. I've used many packages where I, someone who spends most of their waking life in front of computer, has to spend a fair amount of time wondering how to best operate it. These have been much more difficult for the 43-year-old nurse who only has about 10 minutes in any given day to even check their emails. Whenever I make something, I ask myself "I know how to use this, but will someone else?".

I've messed around with HTML, CSS and jQuery to make things such as (and links will come in due time):

• eProcurement fixer - any item found on eProcurement will have its title untruncated and a direct link generated to its page on the NHS Supply Chain Catalogue website
• Oyster Log Stripper - less sensual than it sounds, you can paste in a .CSV of your Oyster history obtained from the TfL website, and it will automatically remove weekends, any entries not related to travel, and let you manually select anything after the fact
• Gimme My Netflix - You probably knew what you were going to watch when you opened Netflix - bumps that to the top of the page instead of being accosted by half-screen recommendations for something you have no interest in (assuming you're watching in browser and not an app)
• Bandcamp Filter - It is very cool that you can browse many different artists in a label's bandcamp page, but it would be even cooler if you could filter out the artists you wanted and differentiate between singles, 15 minute EP's and full LP's. And now you can!
• Fotmob Compressor - I like football score apps and websites to give me as much information as possible. Fotmob is good at that to a certain extent, but it insists on putting about making each row absolutely enormous. This squashes things, increasing the Useful Information Density, and also alternates row colours, because for some reason people LOVE to tabulate things without alternating row colours. It also attempts to remove betting adverts.

If you would like to give me a job to fix your spreadsheets, or even better yet, pay for my training to become an actual programmer, please do drop me a line at real dot email address at website dot com.

In my free time, I enjoy playing the guitar and making unholy noises with guitar pedals (bad Kevin Shields impressions), playing JRPGs (I will defend Final Fantasy 8 with my dying breath), and watching/playing football (okay, mostly watching).