profile

about me

Hello. My name is Jag Uppal and I'm a web developer currently residing in Manchester. I'm twenty-four years old/young and the only member of the global empire that is 4091. When I'm not trying to take over the world I love to play and watch football, listen to music and plan my next snowboarding trip.

I was born and raised in Huddersfield before living in Chamonix on a snowboarding season and then moving to Manchester in 2007.

work

My first foray into web development came whilst building very poor fan sites for bands in my garage. I was seventeen and the web seemed like it was finally delivering what the movie's had promised except we didn't wear silver suits. I wish I still had the sites I built back then to show you, but alas they have disappeared, never to rear their 'design-mode-development' heads again.

Since then my then hobby has turned into a career spanning almost six years where I've worked as a developer for both private and public sector organisations.

Starting at Kirklees gave me the opportunity to learn how to develop websites with accessibility, SEO and validation in mind. Having strict guidelines with what we could and couldn't use I learnt to use different methods to get around problems. I was also lucky to be given time and training to learn CSS; something that would provide priceless when I left in 2005 and started work at The Design Bank.

I was twenty years old, had experience with CSS and knew how to build clean and fast websites. I also knew how to make them accessible, get them to validate and be search engine friendly. This experience helped me build a foundation of knowledge that I apply on a day-to-day basis.

Since those dizzying days of being a developer in my early twenties I have picked up skills in server-side technologies; ASP.NET and PHP and design; Photoshop and Illustrator. My expertise comes from on-the-job training and then later dedicated self-teaching and practice, something which I am quite proud of.

I'm not Superman (although sometimes I think I am) and I'm not afraid to ask for help but I'd like to think I am a disciplined and adventurous developer who doesn't shy away from the challenges that clients (and designers) bring up.

play

In my world music makes the world goes round and when I'm doing pretty much everything, including sleeping, I'm listening to music. Anything with a guitar passes for me and I like most things as long as some effort has gone into it. If you'd like to see my music collection, check out my last.fm account; also have a look at the bottom of this site for the last song I listened to. I am currently in an 80's revival mode and have been for the past 2 years; I fear I will never leave this phase.

If you ever see me staring into space, chances are I'm reliving the glorious goals I've scored and those 'oh so near' misses in my not-so-consistent footballing career. That or the snowboard jumps I intend to do next year. I love the sports and activities I'm into and hope to stay healthy enough to continue doing them; here's to the luck that helped me stay injury free all these years!

This page might make me sound like a busy person and sometimes I am, but mostly I balance my life pretty well. I'm lucky to have the friends and family I have and I make sure I dedicate enough time to annoy them by taking obtrusive photographs of them and telling them why the 80's were such a pivotal time in music.