TEFL

I am a teacher of English as a Foreign Language of almost 40 years standing, now teaching mostly engineers and scientists. I've got some useful expertise in trying to guess what a technically-minded non-native speaker is trying to say about some obscure technical point.

IT Training

I have professional IT training experience. I taught one-week IT seminars to English-speaking Asian IT Professionals on the IT programme at AOTS. I taught ASP; JSP; the UML (especially the ICONIX process); Database design and basic SQL (with Oracle 8, Postgres and MySQL); and setting up a Linux server (Fedora 6)

IT areas of interest

I also have long experience building database-backed systems starting with Access 2.0 in prehistoric times and working through ASP classic, .NET, JSP and PHP (Codeigniter) with database servers like MySQL, SqlServer, Oracle and, my favourite, Postgres. I now use Laravel 5.8 and jQuery most of the time to develop and maintain 2 active databases designed to make report writing easier for my colleagues. I have studied JavaScript now for 20 years and still can't quite grasp closures, but think I finally cracked prototype inheritance (not true - I still haven't cracked it!). I suspect I'm a slow learner but stubborn. I believe Doug Crockford deserves a sainthood or knighthood or something. I also believe that CSS was invented by evil aliens bent on making our lives a total misery in revenge for all those dreadful sci fi movies we made in the fifties. I finally gave up on trying to learn CSS and simply use bootstrap.

Music

Maybe not relevant, but in case you're interested, my new music website: David Mann Japan