Welcome to my little corner of the web

Welcome to my site! My name is Andreas Paterson and I'm a freelance programmer/software developer/software engineer. I'm someone who writes code and knows things about writing code. Obviously, this isn't all that I am, I'm complex and contain multitudes for example I'm also also a father, a husband, a lapsed politician, a sailor and many other things. Ultimately though, writing code is how I sell my labour so that's the aspect of me that's going to dominate my online presence. Speaking of which, if you've arrived at this site because my CV has crossed your desk, you probably want to start here.

As I write the content of this site is in it's infancy, it's just a simple no-fuss online presence with not much in the way of anything fancy. I hope to add a few bits and pieces as I go along.

Void Software Development?

I operate under the name Void Software Development, I chose the name based on an old Games Workshop board game known as Talisman. Players travelled around the board in search of a talisman (hence the name) that would then let them access the central region of the board. An expansion to this game included a selection of alternative endings, one of which was the Horrible Black Void.

I'm honestly not sure why this particular idea stuck with me, but it's the idea the universe put in my head when I was picking a company name. It's only later that I also realised I could phrase it as a kind of programming related pun a la:

void SoftwareDevelopment()
{
    ...
}

About this Site

The site I've put together here is based a simple affair, originally I wrote the app in .NET MVC, but after a few frustrations running it on my hosted webspace I decided to go even simpler using a .NET application to generate raw HTML. The whole site is constructed to be as simple and lightweight as possible. No JavaScript*, no Bootstrap, no React**, no Angular, no jQuery just some plain simple HTML with a bit of CSS to make it look nice. I'd like the main content of my site to be as readable as possible so that it's as usable in Lynx as it is in Chrome, Firefox or Edge.

* I've had to break this promise as I've needed to add a minimal amount of Javascript for a cookie popup.
** This site features a JSON conversion tool written in React, though I'd argue this is a standalone bit of code rather than an essential part of the site.