Meet the Team

Who are Rock Solid Knowledge

We are a group of developers, trainers, consultants who have a passion for technology. With over 100 years of combined engineering experience.

	Richard Blewett
	Richard has been working in the software industry for over 20 years. Starting with mainframes through the early years of client/server to today’s service orientated world. He has spent his professional life working on large distributed systems including being the middle tier architect on the UK national police systems. He now focuses on technologies that enable developers to build large scale systems on the Microsoft platform such as WCF, BizTalk, Workflow and Azure. He is a well known conference speaker having spoken at TechEd, DevWeek, Software Architect and Oredev and can often be found helping people on various newsgroups, mailing lists and web forums, including being a moderator of the MSDN WCF Forum - activity that has resulted in Microsoft awarding him MVP status for Connected Systems. Richard is also a DevelopMentor instructor where he writes and teaches material on WCF, Workflow, BizTalk, Azure, Oslo and a whole range of other technologies.
	Andrew Clymer
	Andy has been working as a Software Engineer since 1993, he has worked with a variety of languages, technologies and operating systems. A large part of his software engineering experience was at Cisco Systems, arriving at Cisco in 1997 as part of an acquistion of a small UK start up. Andy finally left Cisco in 2003, his last role being Lead Architect for Cisco's Identity framework, co-ordinating an international team of developers. After leaving Cisco Andy devoted his time and efforts to .NET technology and splits his time between consultancy/teaching. Andy's area of speciality is patterns and the chaotic world of multithreading/parallel programming. In his teaching role Andy is an instructor for Developmentor, teaching Guerrilla .NET and authoring/teaching Patterns.
	Kevin Jones
	Kevin has been involved in software development for 30 years. Starting out at university on DEC 20s and graduating through mainframes and onto all the versions of Windows. Kevin divides his time between teaching, consultancy and getting his hands dirty with real coding in the real world. Kevin's recent roles involve work as a Technical Architect at ICS systems and at Confused.com where he was responsible for the design and implementation of the new public web site driving 1.6 million quotes through the system in the first month of operation. Kevin's primary areas of expertise are patterns and enterprise architectures in particular web application design and implementation using Model-View-Controller.
	Simon Horrell
	Simon has been involved in software development for over 20 years, mostly working on the various Windows platforms since early betas of Windows 1! During the COM era Simon's main focus was on helping developers to build scalable distributed systems with C/C++, DCOM, MTS, COM+ and MSMQ. Since the advent of .NET he has mainly worked with ASP.NET Web services, ASP.NET Web applications and .NET Winforms applications, mostly in C#. Simon has trained and mentored many developers. He has developed courseware and taught for Developmentor - a highly-regarded provider of developer focused training - since 1998. He has also spoken at both large and small conferences worldwide including WinDev, DevConnections, DevWeek and Object Expo, and published articles for various magazines. During numerous software development assignments Simon has often performed the role of architect, developer and mentor, gaining experience of all stages of a software project lifecycle from inception and design through to deployment. He is particularly interested in helping developers adopt approaches - such as Agile and Test Driven Development - to enable them to build better quality software. Recently he helped BT and UBS to design and build key parts of their .NET based systems
	Andy Olsen
	Andy has been working with Microsoft .NET since Beta 1 days, and has authored many courses for Microsoft on a variety of .NET topics. Andy has also co-written several .NET books for Microsoft Press and Wrox Press. On the Java front, Andy has been using Java since the days when there were only six packages and you could learn all the classes over a weekend. Andy's current interests lie in using XML and Web services to integrate and deploy multi-tier solutions using .NET and J2EE, plus football and skiing where time permits.
	Phil Murphy
	Phil Murphy is a software developer who has spent the past 18 years building web applications for many diverse businesses, mostly using Microsoft technologies, with some Java and Cold Fusion thrown in to mix things up. Recently he has surprised himself by warming to JavaScript, and nowadays is specialising in Single Page Apps (SPAs). When not building web applications for profit, Phil likes to tinker with projects involving Natural Language and Machine Learning.