Curriculum Vitae

Steven Primrose-Smith

Webmaster & Web Developer (2 yrs), Technical Author (7 yrs)

General Information

Education

1981-88 Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn, UK

1990-91 Blackburn College, Blackburn, UK (Part-Time)

A Level - Psychology

1998-Present Open University, UK

Currently studying for my honours degree in Computing.

Work Experience

1988-1994 Technical Author -- Detectronic Limited, Blackburn, UK

After moving from purchasing, I became the company's sole Technical Author in 1991 and was trained by the out-going writer. The position involved documenting both hardware and software as well as creating graphics for the manuals.

1994-1996 Technical Author & WinHelp Author -- Tharstern Ltd, Barnoldswick, UK

I was the sole writer of the company's Windows- and Macintosh-based software user guides, which varied in size from 50 to 200 A5 pages. I also created the Windows help files (the files were created directly without the use of a third-party tool). The help files played an active role during sales presentations and were always demonstrated along with the product. Later I also wrote the company customer newsletters, press releases and other marketing texts.

1996-Present Intranet Webmaster/Web Developer & Technical Author -- AVL List, Graz, Austria

I originally came to AVL to write English Windows- and UNIX-based software documentation (which vary in size from 30 to 300 A4 pages), a role I still perform for approximately 50% of my time. I also create Windows help files using the popular tool, Doc-To-Help. I write within a team of six.

After a couple of months, I suggested the usefulness of a company intranet and, making my hobby my job, was allowed to develop it, a mixed role involving Webmastery and Web Development which now takes 50% of my time. Since its creation, great interest has been generated by the intranet and I also act as technical consultant to AVL's Intranet Team. The intranet now has in excess of 100,000 web pages (many automatically generated) and a similar amount of documents residing in databases throughout the site. See Computer Skills for a full list of programming experience. A list of AVL's intranet site features is also available.

Other Relevant Work

Since November 1997, I have maintained my popular web site - SearchSpaniel - which is currently receiving well over 100,000 hits per month. As well as being a meta-search engine, the site also makes available some of the Java software I have written including a news server and a chat server. The news server in particular is used by many companies, including AVL, and won a Cool Tool award and was classified 'Cool' by Developer.Com. The news server was recently reviewed in glowing terms in the OS/2 E-zine.

The site is listed in Microsoft's Hand-Picked Best Of The Web with a three-out-of-four star rating and over 400 sites have added hyperlinks to the SearchSpaniel site.

Visit the site at: http://www.searchspaniel.com

Computer Skills

I have extensive knowledge of the following languages:

• Java applets and applications
• JDBC for Java database connectivity
• Perl (CGI)
• HTML
• JavaScript
• SQL
• Visual Basic
• C (CGI)
• LiveWire (Netscape's server-side JavaScript)

I have experience of the following platforms:

• PC (Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 3.x, MSDOS)
• UNIX (Sun & HP)
• Macintosh

I have experience of the following software packages (in no particular order):

Netscape Enterprise Server, O'Reilly's Web Site server, the Microsoft Office Suite (particularly Microsoft Word), PageMaker, CorelDraw, Microsoft Image Composer, Microsoft J++, Microsoft FrontPage, most internet browsers and newsreaders, Paint Shop Pro and other graphic tools.

Portfolio

I have a complete collection of software manuals, Windows help files, Java applications, CGI scripts as well as various marketing material. As AVL's intranet resides firmly behind a firewall, please see the list of site features.

Other Information

Hobbies