My name is Nick Pateman and I'm a 27 year old professional software engineer living on the South East Coast of England. Computers have played an important role in my life from as early as the age of 4, when I used to sit with my mother at a Dragon 32 while she would type a game in manually out of a ring bound book of “classic” games. Occasionally she would let me type in a few lines, unbeknown to me that this is what I would spend most of my life doing.
My entry into the professional side of software development began at 18, when I started working for an NVQ in computing at Quality Concepts Ltd in Medway, Kent. My role started as a touch panel GUI designer then within a few months, developed into a control systems software engineer. I wrote software for both AMX and Crestron control systems for boardrooms and lecture halls, in order to automate audio/visual and environmental devices. After a year of employment I was offered a job at Conference Communications, in St. Albans, Hertfordshire. In my new found role I was able to progress my skills even further and was developing software for whole systems consisting of multiple rooms, with an array of leading edge video conference systems, for several large international corporates.
Eventually I decided to take a different route in software development and left Conference Communications. Actually getting to where I wanted now was no easy task. Having no relevant qualifications above the standard high school GSCE exams, I found it almost impossible for employers to give me the chance of proving my skills. Even though I had experience with using Visual Basic 6, it was not enough to attract employers. So I installed my beta 1 copy of Visual Studio .NET and decided to create a project in order to teach myself the latest of languages. During this phase in my career I worked in various unrelated jobs, but dedicated a great portion of my time to developing my software. I created a media viewer for Windows XP which even incorporated my own automated licensing system that would link with my PayPal account and issue licenses to paying customers. Unfortunately this didn’t turn out to be the huge success that I had hoped, so I removed the licensing and made the application completely free, later discovering that my new found DirectShow experience was to kick off exactly what I had been craving all of this time.
Whilst working in a local supermarket I was contacted by Digital Antics, in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and was asked to produce a DirectShow transform filter that would perform “green screen” chromakeying on a live video feed, using C++ and Visual Basic .NET. I snapped up this opportunity immediately and began working on the short term contract. The final solution was on display at both the Wimbledon Tennis Championships and at London Bridge. The client, American Express wanted to offer tennis fans a fun way of interacting with one of their heroes via a green screen, the system would take photos of them posing and then enable them to email, mms or print out a copy. After completing this contract I returned home, just before receiving a call from altaVENTE Ltd where I would start my current role.
My position as Lead Developer for altaVENTE has seen my development skills blossom into a wide range of fields. My original task was to develop a Microsoft “PowerPoint Compiler” called Rhapzode. The application was to enable an author of PowerPoint presentations to create a self contained, secure and portable copy for distribution to their recipients. The security model extended anything that was/is available through any other form of PowerPoint protection and furthermore, did not require any dependencies on the recipients system. This method of protection was then extended to protect the other main products within the Microsoft Office suite and also audio/visual data through a range of desktop products. The past 2 years has seen the product range evolve into a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, consisting of a range of projects that work as
a cohesive unit. Underneath the C# website lies a fully reusable VB.NET/ASP.NET API which communicates with the back end data store, the website itself communicates with a VB.NET desktop client which performs document protection in the most secure way, never transmitting document content over the internet. Once protected, the document can be opened via a C++ document viewer which also doubles as a protected media viewer.
I hope this information has given you a good view of my background history, enough to fill in the missing spaces in CV as to avoid over cluttering it. If you have any questions that remain unanswered, please contact me and I shall be only too happy to hear from you. Thanks for visiting my site!