At Your Service

Always available to discuss your needs, Richard Chubb is an IT professional with nearly 20 years' industrial experience. As well as managing the development of Tender Soft's own technologies and online retail businesses, Richard is available for consultancy / contractor work for busineses of all sizes.

Strengthen your project team with someone properly trained in IT techniques, with varied and high-level experience, as detailed below.

Systems and Languages

Operating System experience includes Sun Solaris; various flavours of Linux such as SuSE and Red Hat (including installation & configuration); and Microsoft Windows.

Unix language experience includes: Perl, C, shell scripting. Windows language experience is mainly using Delphi - having started Windows 3.1 programming in C in the early 90s - and includes HelpFile and installation (InstallShield) authoring.

Database experience includes Oracle (mainly versions 7 and 8) and MySQL; with some exposure to Interbase, Access etc. and developer versions of IBM DB2 (version 8) and Microsoft SQL-Server 2000. Database languages: SQL and a little Oracle PL/SQL.

Internet

Webmaster experience: leading a 40,000-page corporate site with dozens of authors and millions of external hits per month in the 1990s. Configuration of various sites and management of relevant Linux servers since then.

Previous experience includes configuration of dynamic virtual directories e.g. for database-built pages using Oracle PL/SQL, and work with the older versions of the Oracle Application Server and the Apache forerunner, NCSA webserver. Other general experience includes: Secure Sockets Layer configuration (including SSL Certificate ordering), Zope, htDig, etc.; and custom CGI scripting, checking and implementation.

Webserver use: Apache for Unix, including site configuration (with mod_vhost and mod_rewrite); and debugging (example: setting BrowserMatch "MSIE" force-no-vary to prevent IE from reloading CSS-specified images on every single page).

Historically, web application development has mainly been in Perl followed by two years of ColdFusion (augmented by Perl). For the last three years, PHP (bolstered by the skills transferred from ColdFusion, Perl, C, etc.) has led to it becoming very much the current technology of choice for our bespoke internet-delivered systems. Frequent use of JavaScript on the client side.

This site is published using a Tender-Soft built Content Management System, itself programmed in a Tender Soft Web Applications Server (currently written in PHP, with a view possibly to porting it to C in the future).

Database Administration

Unix Oracle Database Administrator with 5 years' experience. (Also several years' DBA experience in older products e.g. Cincom's Supra for the IBM mainframe.) Related skills include OS and Oracle installations (including Developer/ Designer/ Oracle Application Server); technical administration, technical support, debugging, and performance tuning.

Business Skills

Business skills include:

  • Master of Business Administration (Heriot-Watt, 1995);
  • team management experience (from appointment as IBM mainframe Operations Manager in 1990);
  • design, build and promotion of the Sonic Show (currently on hold, awaiting time or an investor).
Copyright © Tender Soft Ltd 1995 - 2008