Richard Jenkins (Stress Free Software)

What we do:

• Write automation scripts and software applications to save you time and effort. Keep doing the same thing over and over again? Prepare regular reports and collect and collate data manually? Get in touch.
• Develop and manage websites. If you need rescuing from a hole with your current designer or hosting provider, we can help. We don't talk a load of technobabble, we explain things in a way you'll understand.
• Fix things. Specifically software systems, databases and websites, but if it's technical and we've got the expertise to help out, we probably will! Nothing we love more than an interesting technical challenge.
• Eat biscuits. Er... not quite sure how that one made it onto the list.

I've always been something of a curious, technically minded person. I was the kid with the screwdriver taking everything apart to see how it worked. I asked 'why?' until people ran out of answers (or patience...). Once I was introduced to the wonders of the computer in about 1999 - well that was it. That was my life in a little beige box. I read the manual until I could pretty much cite it from memory, went through all the tutorials that Tiny (remember them?) bundled with the machine and then went online (at the amazing bandwidth of 56.6 Kbps) looking for more to learn.

I haven't really stopped since! I love learning about... well anything really, but it's the technical/electronic/IT world that really excites me. It's at the forefront of human technology, and yet the entire space is only about 50 years old. Think, in under half a century we've gone from computers that filled whole rooms to ones that you can hold in your hand.

Something to open your mind: Modern smartphones, on average, have a processing speed and capacity 1000 times that of the first supercomputer (Cray-1, completed 1976). And smartphones are being pumped off production lines like there's no tomorrow! Whereas the massive beast that was the Cray took a team of engineers over a year to build.

Anyway, enough computing history - although feel free to ask me about it! :)

I started in business in late 2011 after quickly becoming somewhat disillusioned with the world of wage-earning IT. The job I had wasn't bad per se, but the increasingly unrealistic demands and long commute got to me. The first month or so was quite interesting however - ask me to tell you the story of the 300 crates sometime.

Naively, I started off doing general IT support and maintenance, thinking that this would be the easiest skill to market, but soon realised I was making little return for lots of work and not really enjoying it as much as I felt I should. That, coupled with the fact that I'm a better programmer/systems analyst than I am a technician made me switch to focus on software and website development. I'd already been asked to do some web work, so it made sense.

I'm now splitting my time between developing and fixing 'stuff' (be that websites, automation scripts, software systems) for people and working on my own software to sell. My current project is Stress Free Social, a Twitter automation app, and I've also built newCV.me, an online CV writing guide that allows people to host CVs online as web pages, removing the need for paper, PDFs and such.