Academy Library
About

Learning resources from the Prescription Free Academy of Web Development and Software Engineering.

About This Portal

I thought it was a library?

It’s all a portal. The educator portal is a portal within a portal.

You’ll get used to me. Or you’ll leave. It’s all good. I’m not for everyone.

About Me

I’m Nigel. I enjoy teaching. I love teaching if I can be permitted that indiscretion.

I got started with the internet before the web was a thing. At least in the backwashes of the world (Yorkshire in my case).

That’s in England.

So that was around ‘93/‘94 when I was but a wee bairn. More of a tween actually if we’re being picky.

People seem to like being picky.

Maybe it’s me.

So I did a website for my A Level Computer Science project before anyone really knew what a website was (‘95). For the family retail business. And after meandering around a bit the next years I made my way to working as a professional software engineer by 2002 after a while in network engineering.

No uni. Shock horror. I preferred those years as work experience and don’t regret it (much).

I did a professional qualification that took six weeks or so - a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer or MCSE (‘96). And that got me jobs easily enough until I moved on.

Transition to Teaching

After many happy years in software engineering with web technologies, mostly running a boutique web development outfit, I decided to move in to teaching and mentoring.

That was around 2018.

It took a while and lots of practice but I had good success from the start. My reviews from the beginning will be posted soon and I’ll hopefully remember to add a link here when they are.

By 2023 I’d gained a lot of mentoring experience and some teaching, at which point I joined Preply.

Preply opened up a world of real learners who actually want to learn, which was a breath of fresh air after mostly dealing with troubleshooting assistance and mentoring around that.

And to cut a long story short, here I am.

Find me on Preply if you’d like to take a trial or chat about options for learning.