To most people, I probably come off as a bit of an asshole.  That’s ok, I probably am a bit of an asshole.

I was born in April 1978 in Castlebar in Co Mayo.  I grew up in a small village called Breaffy just outside of the town.  It was a pretty nice place to grow up.

I went to school in St John’s NS, Breaffy and then did my Junior and Leaving certs in St Gerald’s College in Castlebar.  After that I attended GMIT Castlebar and got a diploma in Software Engineering.

I moved away from home, working for a company in Dublin and then to Galway.  After 4 years away, I returned home with a plan to get a degree.  I was pretty disillusioned with work in the software world and was fed up with life in general.

I started working as a hotel porter to keep my bills paid whilst waiting to go and start my degree and quickly realised that despite the awful money and occasionally terrible members of the public, I loved hotel work.  I was management in the hotel inside of 6 months.

An opportunity to move back to Dublin came in 2005 arose and I took it. I continued with hotel work for several years and eventually decided that night shifts and a lack of weekends were too much, so I moved into an opening in the hotel company’s IT department.

A little over a year into that, the opportunity to become the Community Manager of Boards.ie arose and I jumped at it and thankfully got the job.  Life has taken an even more interesting turn since then.