I'm a self taught developer from Manchester, UK, currently living in Barcelona, Spain.
I like it when things look good, but I like it even better when things work well. I'm not the type of frontender who will spend hours on a single animation or effect, but I do go the extra mile and focus on the small details to build a cohesive and pleasant user experience.
I specialise in frontend development, but my journey has been a unique one, which I feel puts me in a unique position in how to tackle and approach problem solving.
From a young age, I loved legos and music. I enjoyed making things out of notes and bricks and was always curious about what happens when you throw imagination at something. When we got our first household computer, I was fascinated about how it worked and quickly started to learn the basics.
It was from this moment that tech started to become a big part of my life. As I got older I started composing, getting into synthesisers, playing computer games, and building my own PC's. I was a bit of a geek and I loved it.
So, it was a natural transition for me to get into tech when I finished school. I finished with good grades, started an ICT apprenticeship and entered the world of tech support. This was where I started to learn all about problem solving and working with users, and also where I gained a deeper understanding of tech and of how it can be used in a professional setting.
However, not all was plain sailing. All throughout my childhood my father suffered from alcoholism and depression. As a result, I was put into situations a kid should not have to see or experience. During these tough times I threw myself into my imagination and used this to fuel my passions and discover my creative side. Going through this and losing my dad at an early age has left many scars that I still wear to this day. Nonetheless, it has also shaped me into the person I am today, and has given me the opportunity to develop an empathy and an ability to understand people and their problems that I might not have had otherwise.
I mention this because I feel it has immensely helped me in my career. Starting in tech support, I realised that the most important thing are the users, and being able to understand their needs through listening and asking the right questions goes a long way and should not be underestimated.
Throughout the years, I have had plenty of experience solving complex problems, either alone or helping other people and teams. I firmly believe that I could help not because I was better or smarter, but because I could approach problems from a different perspective, which often shed light into new avenues of thought - and problems that at first looked complex or illogical would soon start to make sense.
It is this experience in life and in tech in general that I believe puts me in a unique position to approach problem solving as a software engineer, and why I pair so well working with other developers who might not have had the opportunity to work and solve problems outside of their academic scope.
I've talked a lot about my personal journey, but not much about programming. It took me a while to realise my true joy for coding. Along the way I got a lot into hardware, networking, infrastructure and tech support.
My first experience with programming actually started way back in my computer gaming years. I was really into a MMORPG called Legend of Mir, so much so that while scouring forums one day I found a copy of the map building software and eagerly started learning and building maps. I found I could use assets in creative ways not used in the base game, which gave my maps a new and fresh feel.
After sharing my creations, they garnered attention and a few were featured in some private servers. This encouraged me to keep building and get more involved in the community. Through these connections I was offered to take over running one of the servers which at the time had hundreds of daily active users. This was a truly exciting moment for me, as I had the opportunity to run and manage a game server of a game which I had invested many (probably too many) hours in.
My curiosity peaked when I started to explore the game files and could learn more about how things worked. As I began to understand and experiment with the proprietary language, I realised I could start designing quests and create quality of life improvements that were much appreciated by the player base.
For about one year and a half I worked with the community and player base, designing quests, maps and events for a game that had not received new content for the best part of a decade.
Eventually over time the popularity of the game waned and the cost of running the servers became too much and they were shut down, but I'm sure my maps and quests live on somewhere on the internet.
This was my first taste of programming and I loved it, but I didn't even consider at the time this could be a viable career choice.
My first taste of 'coding' in a work environment was actually bash scripting. We were rolling out PGP disk encryption to around a thousand devices. I realised I could automate a large part of the tasks by writing an interactive script, so I could do many devices in parallel. I shared the script with my colleagues and collectively we saved many hours.
Although it was super simple, I started to feel that same excitement when playing lego as a kid, or designing quests and maps. From then on I decided to invest time and start learning. This journey led me to embark on many side projects, as well as building sites for family and bands I was playing in at the time. They were very simple and probably not very impressive, but that is where everyone starts. You just have to keep at it.