User:Julianporter

=General Stuff About Me= My name is Julian Porter. I work in a number of IT-related areas, plus some non-IT stuff.

Robotics
I run a small business designing control systems for mobile robots. if you're interested check out JP Embedded Solutions. I am particularly interested in applying some rigour to the design process, so using tools like executable UML and the Model Driven Architecture to ensure that most of the work goes into making sure the requirements are met rather than fiddling with microcontrollers.

General IT
For more information on all of these topics see my IT page.

Web Applications
I am interested in designing web applications, and general web design. I offer the following services:
 * Web design: I design web-sites with or without active content.
 * Developing number of general modules for things like managing role-based user authentication to web-apps.

Software development and delivery methods
I am interested in ways of making IT delivery into less of an art and more of a deterministic craft. Thus my key areas of research are:
 * MDA and UML
 * Agile delivery processes

Other Stuff
For all of this see my personal website =My MediaWiki Extensions=
 * Music
 * Writing
 * Philosophy
 * Maths

MakeArticle
This is an extension that, given a template, presents the user with a form in which they can fill in the template's parameters. If they then click a button, it will go ahead and build a page based on those specifications. Essentially, it takes the idea from extensions like CreateArticle and extends it by allowing the text pre-loaded into the new page to be configurable on the fly, so providing a handy tool for creating new pages by filling in a form.
 * As a handy extra feature, the style of the form is defined in an external style-sheet that the wiki manager can edit to get a look-and-feel of their own choosing (the code to do this was based on PageCSS).