My name, as you may have read above, is Jonathan Hawkins. I currently live in Horsham, (West Sussex), with my beautiful girlfriend Charlotte and my two wonderful step children Dale and Ethan. The picture from right to left is: Ethan and Dale.

Since graduating from Sussex University in the summer of 2006, (god time does fly!), I started to work for an insurance and reinsurance company in Crawley, namely Ace. I joined the company on the 20th of September 2006, and since then my role has been as an Analyst Programmer. This role has given me the time and ability to develop, expand and strengthen my knowledge and programming ability. I deal with a wide number of issues from application failures, to new installations to redeveloping existing programs.

At university I studied Computer Science with Artificial intelligence as a mature student (age 25 when I re-entered Higher Education). I achieved a 2:2 from a well known and respected establishment.

I did not directly learn about web design through university but taught my self most of what I now know along side my more formal education. My web design knowledge has certainly changed, (for the better I may add!), over that time. The projects Section has some links to previous sites and older pieces of work that show my progress and learning curve over the years. I started from an Open source point of view, only really because the hosting company I went with used PHP, Apache and MySQL so that is what I had to play with. I now primarily use C# and ASP.NET to build Desktop and Console applications as well as Web Services and Web Sites.

I hope you enjoy looking around this site.

There have been a number of personal and work projects that I have been involved in, a recent project being the redevelopment and release of this site. It has gone through a lot of change, ( old site can be found here), and development. To some degree this is always an on going project as the more I learn the more I develop, extend and change this site to reflect my skills and interests.

C# has become one of the main languages I now use (although I am moving more and more to Ubuntu (Linux) personally. I use C# at work and for a lot of my personal coding). More information about what Operating Systems and hardware I use and for what can be found here.

There are two on going projects that are primarily C# orientated. The first being a redevelopment of the Jawbreaker game I previously did in Java. The second being a Poker server and client application using Remoting.

I wanted to recreate the Jawbreaker game because my boys love the game and I can put it onto their computers (rather than on my phone ;). Honestly though. The main reason was because I wanted to learn how to use C# more, how to improve my knowledge and skills, and hopefully to gain an undertanding of animations. The projects name is CS Jabreaker, CS standing for C Sharp the language I used to create it. This project will use Windows Applications, Web Services and a Web Site to achieve its goal. More information on CS Jawbreaker can be found here.

The motivation for the Poker project was to learn how to use Remoting, animations, Web Services, and Web Pages to see how they can all be pulled together to produce larger applications that cross some of the divides of the Internet and the personal computer. I originally took on this project in Java for my dissertation at Sussex University achieving a reasonable 74%. The project was a large and ambitions one which I did not fully achieve. This time round I do not intent to fail. I hope to have more information available soon on this project.