About Me

Hi there, I’m Nick Bloor. I’ve been a programmer and a gamer since a young age and I enjoy tackling interesting challenges such as those often presented in game development. I also enjoy website development and I have a very keen interest in the technical, physical, and psychological aspects of security. This page details some of my interests and lists my main technical skills.

My portfolio page has some examples of my work and my blog is where I write about and share things that I find interesting or useful. I can be contacted via the contact page or you can comment on my individual blog posts and portfolio pages.

Interests

Game Development

Game development is where it all started for me. I love the challenges involved in game development and I’m quite interested in artificial intelligence. I have developed many small personal projects mostly using C++ and DirectX. One such project is a demonstration of the A* graph search algorithm applied to path finding that I wrote after learning about the algorithm. In the first half of 2009 I entered a competition ran by the British Computer Society and won two awards for writing an articial intelligence player for the game Connect 4.

Web Development

I enjoy web development and in particular working with PHP for back-end development and jQuery for front-end user interface work. I started with PHP/MySQL by creating a simple content management system (CMS) as a learning project and since then I have worked with many popular CMS applications including Drupal and WordPress. I also have some experience working in a Java server environment using the Spring MVC framework and Hibernate for object persistence.

Security

I first gained an interest in computer security through hunting down and removing viruses which later lead to me learning about and doing personal research into the software issues that are used to spread viruses – for example buffer overflow issues that can lead to malicious code execution. As I gained interest in website development I have also learnt more about the security issues and exploits affecting websites and computer networks.

Technical Skills and Experience

Programming Languages

  • ActionScript
  • C, C++
  • C# and .NET
  • Java
  • Perl
  • Visual Basic 6 and VB.NET

Web Technologies

  • ActionScript
  • CSS
  • Flash
  • HTML, XHTML
  • JavaScript
  • Java EE, Java servlets, Java Server Pages (JSP)
  • jQuery
  • MySQL
  • PHP

Web Frameworks and APIs

  • Java-based
    • Hibernate
    • Spring MVC, Spring Security
  • PHP-based
    • Drupal
    • Joomla
    • Simple Machines Forum (SMF)
    • WordPress
  • Web Service APIs
    • eBay API
    • Twitter API
    • YouTube API

Other

  • Game Development/Graphics APIs
    • DirectX
    • SDL
    • XNA
  • Operating Systems
    • Linux
    • Windows

Achievements

2009 British Computer Society Student Programming Contest

In mid-2009 I entered a BCS student programming contest where the goal was to create the best artificial intelligence player for the game Connect 4. I won one of the two first prizes and a second award for professionalism – for writing code that the contest organisers found really easy to read and understand.

My trophies from the 2009 BCS student programming contest.

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