About

Hello, my name is Tim Dwyer and Eiger Media is the place where I can show off some of my skills and keep an up-to-date blog. I am a Web developer and musician (an odd mix?) working and living in London. At the moment I am contracting for a major UK mobile phone network.

A little history

I was born in Yorkshire and at four years old moved to Shropshire where I grew up. I now live in North London. Presented here is a very brief summary of my working life to date.

In 1999 I went to University as a mature student to study Multimedia Communication. The course lasted for three years in which time I developed many skills and even won an a Shell Technology award for a VB application that I developed for a company. I left Wolverhampton University with a 2.1 degree and embarked on my new career as a Multimedia specialist. I skipped the work placement year as I had already obtained 11 years of work experience.

I took to computer programming modules like a fish to water; I think that this was because I had developed games when I was a teenager using a Z80 based Toshiba MSX computer (similar to the old Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum). I used to develop games using Microsoft Basic and machine code (via an assembler program). This was thought to be quite advanced around the mid 1980s, even my teacher in Computer Studies didn't know what I was doing.

I should have gone on to study computer languages at college but around this time there weren't many courses available and I ended up on an electronics course. I studied electronics at college and went on to work for several large companies, including Tatung UK, as a calibration and maintenance engineer. Although I quite liked the job, my time here ended with redundancy after just one year.

I went on to work for a surface engineering company servicing the oil industry. The company was fairly small but successful and I obtained many skills, I was a team leader for seven of the nine years that I worked there. Becuase the company was small and my skills were very specialised (only a few other companies in England like this one), I felt a bit trapped, especially as I have always been more of a "creative" type.

Whilst working for the company I played in a successful band as a singer/songwriter/guitarist. This was a great outlet for the creative juices, but as the time went on I felt I needed a vocation that would also be a creative one. A friend of mine had recently completed a Multimedia course and he advised me to do the same, not least because our band manager at the time was also head of the course, Professor Stephen Molyneux. In fact, it was he who set up the first BA Multimedia course in the UK back in the early nineties.

After University I worked for a Telecoms company called Glow Telecom, based in London and Shropshire. Here, I developed the companies many websites. You could say this is where I cut my teeth as far as Web development is concerned. Because the owners of Glow were a large offshore investment company, I also got to develop many interesting sites for their other projects. Please refer to the Portfolio on this site. Glow went out of business in early 2005; after the compnay folding, I set off to London.

When I arrived in London I started contracting for the Financial Times. The contract lasted for over a year until July 2006. Since then I have been contracting for DSL (a company owned by Dial-a-Phone - now part of the Phones4U group). DSL offer many varied services to the telecommunications industry, hence, I have been working on the 3 Store website for two years.

Multimedia skillset