About Helen

Helen - note the cheesy grin and the threadless t-shirt
Helephant.com is run by me, Helen Emerson. I’m an Australian living in the UK, which is a rite of passage for 20 to 30 year old Australians. I have spent the last few years learning to fear getting wet, seeing interesting northern hemisphere countries and teaching Joe how to talk Australian.

The strangest thing about writing one of these pages is resisting the urge to write about myself in third person like I have a staff of people managing my web presence like the Queen. Unfortunately as I’m not royal, famous or rich the entire burden of updating relies entirely on me and any third person writing would simply be misleading.

This website is just basically where I keep my ideas and discoveries about web development.

My descent into madness (how I become a webbie)

I got my start with a fan site for a computer game in 1997 while I was still at high school. This ended up being a five year obsession which left me completely smitten with web development. When I finished high school I decided to do a university degree focused on software engineering and I found that having l33t webskills was a good way to earn enough pocket money so I didn’t have to find a real job.

In 2002 I did a year of industry placement as part of my degree and have been doing web development related work ever since. My biggest regret is that I traded student life for money (and broadband internet) and finished my degree part time. Never again will I get three month long holidays or have a regular four day weekend.

Since I came to the UK in 2004 I’ve been an ASP.NET developer. Despite what my open source friends say, I’m not a Microsoft Fangirl, I just like the .NET framework and think that as a web development technology it has a lot going for it. :)

The fundamental interconnectedness of everything

I am 72% web2.0 compliant.