About Me
Welcome to my new online home! As you may have guessed by now, my name is Joe Lennon, and I am a 24 year old software developer from Cork in Ireland. My interests include technology, writing, motoring, food and travelling. I work for Core International, a HR software company with offices in Cork, Dublin, Kilkenny and Birmingham in the UK. The bulk of my work for Core is on our Employee Self Service (ESS) products and the CorePortal application, developed with PL/SQL and HTML/CSS/JavaScript. In recent times, I have played a key part in pushing emerging web application technologies into Core’s web-based products, introducing concepts such as Ajax and Web 2.0 and making significant improvements to the UI design.
Aside from Core, I have worked on several projects a freelance developer. The most recent of these projects was the redevelopment of Learn French by Podcast, a website which provides free podcasts to those wishing to learn French as a foreign language. Additionally, LFBP allows users to download PDF guides for a small charge. I was responsible for taking LFBP’s dated legacy payment system, and developing a new backend system from scratch which would allow registered users to purchase “credits”, which they could then use to download the PDF guides. As part of the LFBP project, I took an arduous manual process of modifying HTML pages, uploading files and managing users, sales, feedback and guides and automated it, resulting in a huge reduction of work and stress for LFBP’s owner.
“Joe Lennon built and implemented (with php, MySQL, etc) the entire back-end to our site at www.learnfrenchbypodcast.com. He collaborated on the front-end, too, providing very coherent and useful advice. Joe provided a superlative service from start to finish, working methodically and efficiently, all the while providing updates on his progress at any given time. He gave a deadline of 6 weeks, stuck rigidly to schedule and continues to provide top-class after-sales support. His work has been of the highest possible standard and he has been approachable and available at all times throughout the project. I would have no hesitation whatever in recommending Joe for projects.”
– Hugh Nagle, Managing Director, Plus Publications (Apr 29, 2008)
Over the past few years, I have written many tutorials, most of which have been published on the various iterations of my blog I’ve gone through! These tutorials have been on various subjects, from web development using simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript to dynamic application techniques with languages such as PHP, MySQL, PL/SQL, Oracle and others. I will be posting some tutorials (and links to tutorials I have written for other sites such as IBM developerWorks) on this blog. Who knows, you might even find something helpful! In addition to writing tutorials, I tutored Java to over 100 students at University College Cork in 2006/07.
I graduated from University College Cork in 2007 with a First Class Honours degree in Business Information Systems. I had a great four years at UCC, achieving a 1H in every year. I received an Undergraduate Scholarship in 2006 for having one of the top 5 results amongst Third Year students in the Commerce faculty. I worked on a wide variety of projects in college, for which I mostly received results of above 90%, including:
- Full-blown Online Music Store, built with Java Server Pages
- Inventory Inspection and Certification System, buit with PHP/MySQL
- Book Store Management System, built with Java
- Multiplayer Battleships game, built with Java RMI
- Student management database, built with Oracle
- Text-based game based on Zork, built with C++
- Online store for computer manufacturing company
- and many more…
In 2006 I spent six months on an internship with Fidelity Investments in Marlborough, MA. I worked as a Systems Analyst, and gained my first proper experience of working in IT. It was an overwhelming experience, being just one of 40,000 odd employees on the Fidelity payroll. I gained invaluable communication skills from this experience, and I learned a lot about exactly what it was I wanted to do for a career. I enjoyed being an analyst, but I always felt the urge to go ahead and actually develop the software I was documenting.
While working for Fidelity, I lived in Brighton, MA, about a 30 minute commute from Marlborough and about a 15 minute drive from downtown Boston (or 40 minutes on the “T”). The best part about the internship was being able to travel every weekend. We were young with very little financial commitments, earning a decent amount of money, so we spent it on various trips at the weekends. New York was an obvious destination, which was repeated several times, usually via the ridiculously cheap Fung Wah bus. A large group of us hired decent cars (our own cars wouldn’t have made it) and drove to Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix, which was a brilliant weekend. I also went on some excellent trips with my girlfriend, Jill. The best of these included another long drive to Niagara Falls and Toronto, to Washington DC and to Fort Lauderdale and Orlando in Florida. I’m hoping to return to the U.S. in the not too distant future and explore what the West Coast has to offer!
So that’s pretty much all there is to know about Joe Lennon (or at least that’s all I want you to know!). I hope you find the tutorials on the site useful, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at joe AT joelennon DOT ie. You can also follow me on twitter. (If it’s not down of course!)
Thanks for visiting my site, and I hope you return again soon.
Welcome to my new online home! As you may have guessed by now, my name is Joe Lennon, and I am a 24 year old software developer from Cork in Ireland. My interests include technology, writing, motoring, food and travelling. I work for Core International, a HR software company with offices in Cork, Dublin, Kilkenny and Birmingham in the UK. The bulk of my work for Core is on our Employee Self Service (ESS) products and the CorePortal application, developed with PL/SQL and HTML/CSS/JavaScript. In recent times, I have played a key part in pushing emerging web application technologies into Core’s web-based products, introducing concepts such as Ajax and Web 2.0 and making significant improvements to the UI design.
Aside from Core, I have worked on several projects a freelance developer. The most recent of these projects was the redevelopment of Learn French by Podcast, a website which provides free podcasts to those wishing to learn French as a foreign language. Additionally, LFBP allows users to download PDF guides for a small charge. I was responsible for taking LFBP’s dated legacy payment system, and developing a new backend system from scratch which would allow registered users to purchase “credits”, which they could then use to download the PDF guides. As part of the LFBP project, I took an arduous manual process of modifying HTML pages, uploading files and managing users, sales, feedback and guides and automated it, resulting in a huge reduction of work and stress for LFBP’s owner.
“Joe Lennon built and implemented (with php, MySQL, etc) the entire back-end to our site at www.learnfrenchbypodcast.com. He collaborated on the front-end, too, providing very coherent and useful advice. Joe provided a superlative service from start to finish, working methodically and efficiently, all the while providing updates on his progress at any given time. He gave a deadline of 6 weeks, stuck rigidly to schedule and continues to provide top-class after-sales support. His work has been of the highest possible standard and he has been approachable and available at all times throughout the project. I would have no hesitation whatever in recommending Joe for projects.”
– Hugh Nagle, Managing Director, Plus Publications (Apr 29, 2008)
Over the past few years, I have written many tutorials, most of which have been published on the various iterations of my blog I’ve gone through! These tutorials have been on various subjects, from web development using simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript to dynamic application techniques with languages such as PHP, MySQL, PL/SQL, Oracle and others. I will be posting some tutorials (and links to tutorials I have written for other sites such as IBM developerWorks) on this blog. Who knows, you might even find something helpful! In addition to writing tutorials, I tutored Java to over 100 students at University College Cork in 2006/07.
I graduated from University College Cork in 2007 with a First Class Honours degree in Business Information Systems. I had a great four years at UCC, achieving a 1H in every year. I received an Undergraduate Scholarship in 2006 for having one of the top 5 results amongst Third Year students in the Commerce faculty. I worked on a wide variety of projects in college, for which I mostly received results of above 90%, including:
- Full-blown Online Music Store, built with Java Server Pages
- Inventory Inspection and Certification System, buit with PHP/MySQL
- Book Store Management System, built with Java
- Multiplayer Battleships game, built with Java RMI
- Student management database, built with Oracle
- Text-based game based on Zork, built with C++
- Online store for computer manufacturing company
- and many more…
In 2006 I spent six months on an internship with Fidelity Investments in Marlborough, MA. I worked as a Systems Analyst, and gained my first proper experience of working in IT. It was an overwhelming experience, being just one of 40,000 odd employees on the Fidelity payroll. I gained invaluable communication skills from this experience, and I learned a lot about exactly what it was I wanted to do for a career. I enjoyed being an analyst, but I always felt the urge to go ahead and actually develop the software I was documenting.
While working for Fidelity, I lived in Brighton, MA, about a 30 minute commute from Marlborough and about a 15 minute drive from downtown Boston (or 40 minutes on the “T”). The best part about the internship was being able to travel every weekend. We were young with very little financial commitments, earning a decent amount of money, so we spent it on various trips at the weekends. New York was an obvious destination, which was repeated several times, usually via the ridiculously cheap Fung Wah bus. A large group of us hired decent cars (our own cars wouldn’t have made it) and drove to Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix, which was a brilliant weekend. I also went on some excellent trips with my girlfriend, Jill. The best of these included another long drive to Niagara Falls and Toronto, to Washington DC and to Fort Lauderdale and Orlando in Florida. I’m hoping to return to the U.S. in the not too distant future and explore what the West Coast has to offer!
So that’s pretty much all there is to know about Joe Lennon (or at least that’s all I want you to know!). I hope you find the tutorials on the site useful, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at joe AT joelennon DOT ie. You can also follow me on twitter. (If it’s not down of course!)
Thanks for visiting my site, and I hope you return again soon.