Paul Fletcher

About Me

Hi, I'm Paul.
I've been enjoying creating and inspiring digital hardware & software solutions for over 3 decades.

I live in Kent but have worked with clients all over the world across a huge diversity of sectors.

To quote my mother, I have been “obsessed with electronics” since the age of 10 after a school holiday visit to a public library where I found “Learnabout… Simple Electronics”. A few years on, this expanded to include the wonderful world of software.

I’m still ‘obsessed’, although I’d use the term focused and driven nowadays, but still loving every day of it!

Skills Overview

Embedded Dev

With the recent upsurge of I.O.T, I have been helping clients with firmware design and builds on projects that are both Bare Metal (ESP8266/ESP32 & PIC/AVR) & OS based (RPi, embedded Linux). Mostly in C++ (using Visual Studio Code & MPLAB/PICkit), Python or Shell & Perl. However, if an MPU/SoC option doesn't cut the grade its time to turn to FPGAs. The work I have done in this area is focused around VHDL (which reminds me of Delphi or Pascal) with Quartus & USBBlaster, but I've also lightly used IceStudio recently.

Multi-platform

For 'PC' type computers I'm currently a huge fan of the Qt C++ Framework and why?

One code base that I can develop and run in Windows, MacOS & Linux (including the RPi) with minimal changes - Awesome! It even works on Android and iOS (with a little more work), I've also used wxWidgets.

Switching to Java, I worked with a number of banking clients during the 90's and where I first got in to Servlets, I had a great mentor in 'Java Jools' a then employee of Sun Microsystems.

Manage & Mentor

In recent times I have been a contract solution designer often running small teams of 'techs' as 'Team Lead' reporting the the management within the client. I have previously held board level posts in businesses of 40+ employees. Whatever the size, I strive to get the best from my team(s) through constant review and mentoring while keeping focused on the end goal.
Team collaboration and project asset management (source code, web images, etc) is also key and I use either SVN on an Amazon E2 instance or good old GitHub.

Client Server Dev

Cross Platform, high throughput, OOP solutions in C++, Java, Delphi. From Banking MiddleWare to Client/Server point to point data delivery & reporting. From Barcode Gun Servers to Logistics/Retail E.D.I. I've worked on a number of exciting projects.
It goes without saying there is usually a databases to two in there and I have most commonly used (and admin-ed) MS-SQL & MySQL although I strive to keep the SQL in my code generic or easy to port to other flavours.

AWS, sysAdmin, Documentation

I'm comfortable in providing user level support for a multitude of Desktop & Server platforms. My own workstations include a MacBook with Windows and Mint Linux Virtual Machines, a triple headed Mint Linux machine with a Windows 10 VM. When I need a public facing server for a project I turn to Amazon's E2 and RDS solutions.

Documentation is always an important part of any project, user guides, project reports, UML diagrams they all have they place, I'm also I fan of source code documenting tools like JavaDoc or Qt's QDoc.