About

Hobby, then profession, then a company.

I’m a geek who was lucky enough to turn a hobby into a profession, and then into VeriSmart.

I liked computers as a kid, but it wasn’t until the end of 1999 that I got my first Windows PC. Two months later I had my first I.T. job, on the support desk of a car-dealership management software company.

I loved it there. There was so much to learn that I never got bored. The phones improved my soft skills; the work grew the technical ones. UNIX servers, double-entry accounts, the lot. Then the product moved from local servers to a centrally managed, cloud-ish setup, and the job became logging calls for head office.

By then I had been teaching myself web development. I rewrote the horrible intranet from scratch, moved the support knowledgebase onto a database-driven classic ASP system (this was pre-.NET), and built small web apps that paid for themselves in time saved. I was also learning LAMP at home. When the new support work stopped being rewarding I went freelance rather than move to Birmingham for the in-house web team.

After a few years and a few large-ish projects I had had enough of working on my own. I joined Inventories Online, and eventually partnered with the people I met there. That became Inventoryclerk.com, then VeriSmart in 2015. I co-founded it with Jonathan in 2008. I am still the tech guy. I still write the systems.

The old version of this page ended with “I one day hope to own a dog.” That update shipped. I live in Dorset with my wife and our dog, Daisy. I get out into the woods, wild camp, play guitar badly, read a lot, and drink craft beer.

If you want the short version of what I am doing this month, that is on the now page. If you want to write: dean@verismart.co.uk.