My name is Natalie and I am a 33 year old woman living in Bournemouth, England. I am the geek of the family – my partner jokes that I am the IT manager.

I grew up in France and moved to England in 1998. In 1984, my mother bought an Amstrad computer and I fell in love with programming. Later, at University, I found myself studying civil engineering – more or less by chance – but I also got into web design – that meant HTML coding back then (1994!). Then I got into php, MySQL, javascript and css and, finally, I started learning Java.

I now develop applications for Google Android. If you have a Google Android phone, go to the market and look for “Big Words Plus” – a vocabulary building app, “Big Fingers Keyboard” – a soft keyboard with big buttons, “Life Tracker Plus” – a way to track how often you do certain things, whatever these things are, the choice is yours – and “Cogitas Task List”, a to-do task list. I also develop web apps (HTML5/CSS3) and I am learning desktop development (with Qt and C++) .

I left my day job as a highways design engineer in May 2010 to focus on programming full time – exciting times!

As well as programming languages, I also like (spoken) languages. I speak French and English fluently, I speak some Spanish and German, and I am learning Japanese. My plan is to learn Chinese (Mandarin) in a few years. In terms of programming languages, I am learning C++ at the moment and I plan to learn Scala later in the year.

I play the guitar, I write weird punky songs, I compose neo-classical music, I have written a novel and several short stories and I always have a few creative projects on the go.