[frame class=”alignleft” title=”” link=”” src=”/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/aaron_wedding.jpg” width=”” height=”” target=”” align=”left” style=””]Hi, I’m Aaron Cooper. Web Developer, snow junkie, music lover, godfather and perhaps the only man on earth who has cut himself with a Philishave.

I kicked off my career in IT back in 2002 by developing industrial printing templates in PReS for one of New Zealand’s largest direct mailing houses, Western Mailing. These templates were used to print 10’s of thousands of impressions for customers such as Vodafone, Contact Energy and Auckland City Council.

At the end of 2003, I embarked on the great Kiwi tradition that is the OE, and spent 2 years in London, UK. It was there that I had my first commercial exposure to web development working at St John’s Wood private hospital. It was also here that I started a love affair with my chosen language of expertise; PHP.

2005 saw me return home to Auckland and focus on my career, starting with 5 years of service with Ecomcorp (today know as Advanced Transaction Systems). As Senior Developer, creative freedom was granted and this allowed me to complement my PHP skills by implementing richer user experiences by way of jQuery, ExtJs, Qooxdoo and AJAX methodologies. It was also during my stint at Ecomcorp that I became a Zend Certified Engineer and adopted the excellent home-grown Silverstripe Open Source CMS and MVC framework. Ecomcorp evolved into ATS. A transition that saw me work alongside most of New Zealand’s largest banks, including ANZ, ASB, BNZ and National Bank.

Today, I can be found at GrabOne Headquarters in Newmarket, working on the team in charge of GrabOne’s older sibling and online trading facility, Sella. This is a “true” team-based development environment with rigid lifecycle policies that don’t stifle creativity.

When I’m not cutting code for work and fun, I can be found toying with photography, fishing in Northland, and in the winter months strapping a thin slab to my feet and heading down a mountain somewhere.

Samples of my work can be found over on my Work page. Feel free to take a look, and if you have anything to say, let me know.