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On this site, I try to give something back by sharing some of the solutions I’ve found to various coding and tech-related problems, along with any other ideas or observations.

I’m John Wells, a British expat living in China since 1999. I work in knowledge management / marketing at a large corporation, and also created WP-United, the phpBB-WordPress integration, along with a number of other projects, some old, some new, some in the pipeline and some long-abandoned. I’m an experienced, self-taught PHP / MySQL developer and LAMP administrator, but learning constantly.

I’m a self-confessed open source zealot. Open source code is the future, and I firmly believe that an open and collaborative approach will go a long way to  solving the world’s problems, while a proprietary, patent-riddled approach has been slowing innovation for far too long. It is also, in 99% of cases, better for most tasks.

Secrets and patents aren’t going to make nuclear fusion power work, get us to Mars, or solve global warming. Quite the opposite unfortunately.

Sharing information and building on each others’ successess is the way for computing to move forward.

That’s the main reason I decided to sit down one afternoon and set up this blog. Despite being free from the Microsoft train-wreck at home, my working life is unfortunately 100% the opposite, trying to tame ASP classic under IIS, and — even worse — SharePoint. Sometimes creating a project using these painful tools feels a bit like sitting down to a banquet without a knife and fork.

While I unfortunately can’t share code or confidential  content I write for my employer, I can share some solutions to generic problems, and hope that, in the spirit of open source, other people do the same. If I ever get the time, I hope I can also help other people escape the proprietary lock-in at work and home. I won’t fuse hydrogen, or get us to Mars (not yet anyway), or even promise to write aything useful, but I hope I can save some people some time, and learn new things in the process.

I’m also an avid photographer — you can see my work at Flickr,  and a small time electronics/microcontroller hobbyist. Other hobbies are too numerous to list, but include astronomy/astrophotography, and reefkeeping. I ritually neglect all of them.