I'm an outdoorsy girl - happiest in my home town of Stroud with my family, friends and a pint of cider in hand (preferably Westons) without the distractions of technology or playing hockey for Lansdown Hockey Club in Cheltenham.

In direct opposition to this, I spend my weekdays as a project manager for a software development company specialising in web applications - Firehoop Ltd in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire - and I love it there, mostly because of the team, but I think we produce great products too.

After spending most of my early life training to be a musician and never touching a computer, I was forced to change direction and learn something I'd never considered before - thus discovering my inner geek which I have now wholeheartedly embraced!!

I learned the ropes on the infrastructure side of things back in the days of DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 as well as gaining a good foundation knowledge of RDBMS and basic VB programming.

Then, wishing to spread my wings and discover what the streets of London really were paved with, I took a job as an infrastructure consultant and project manager after passing my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (NT 4.0). During this time, I was lucky enough to work with a talented programmer (George Adamson) who taught me all about websites and recruited me temporarily into the development team to work on a large banking web project as a junior web developer.

Never able to break my bond with the Stroud Valleys, I fell in love with a boy who wasn't so fond of my weekday absences, so I took a job nearer to home as an IT Manager. This required me to be a bit of a jack of all trades and call on all of the technical skills I'd ever learnt from day-to-day support, phone systems, web development, server/infrastructure support and project management.

Ever since having the opportunity to work on the banking project, I'd wanted to get back into a more specialist role within a web development environment and was lucky enough to express an interest in Firehoop at the right time...and here I am!