About
My name is John Clark, but with my Web hat on I go under the name of Jack Gringo. I have my reasons. I am based in Glasgow, Scotland, and live with my lovely wife Wendy and our two cats.
I have been building Web sites since 1997, making my first page with Microsoft Word(!?). Over the last 10 years I've read some great books and blogs on design, Rails, HTML, PHP, Javascript etc. and honed my skills along the way. Now, as a versatile and competent developer/designer I'm dedicating my time to writing clean, standards-based code and neat visuals for the Web.
I am a daily user of Ruby on Rails, (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and Adobe design products. I also have experience of working with various CMSs, Flash, AJAX, Javascript, XML, Coldfusion and CakePHP. My aim with every job is to make attractive, useable and accessible Web sites.
I'm influenced by buildings, cities, design, synthesisers, XTC, YMO, minimalism, maximalism, retro, nowtro (sorry couldn't resist a borrow from "A Mighty Wind") and really good, interesting Web designers.
My other life is a musician/producer. I was in the band bis from 1994 (when I was 15) to 2003. With bis I toured the world and saw some amazing sights in Japan, Australia, Europe and America. We were also the first unsigned band on Top Of The Pops. I now play guitar in the Amphetameanies, and electronics in Dirty Hospital.
Core Skills
Back end development
- Ruby on Rails
- PHP
- MySQL
Front end development
- (X)HTML
- Javascript inc. jQuery, MooTools
- CSS inc. Blueprint
Version control
- Git
- Subversion
Testing / debugging
- RSpec
- Cucumber
- Firebug
Design
- Photoshop
