A chef’s journey from pots and pans to bashing keyboards

After spending 15 years working at some of London’s finest restaurants, I'm after a new challenge in software development! How did this come about? Well, during the pandemic I spent a fair amount of time on furlough, after getting bored of making sourdough a friend recommended giving coding a go - as I had no idea if I would still have a job to go back to. I’m enjoying this new challenge and it is great fun learning a new skill while being able to be creative and build my own projects. Wanting to turn this into more than just a hobby, I did my research and joined Makers Academy.

| Projects | Makers-Academy | Work-Experience | Skills | Bonus-Points | Hobbies |

(August 2021 to November 2021) 12-week intensive coding boot camp

• Object-oriented design
• Focus on pair programming and group projects
• Agile working style
• EQ, empathy and teamwork workshops
• XP values
• Full-stack web development
• Independent learning and problem-solving
• Experience with MVC framework
• Frameworks/library’s: Rails, React, Sinatra
• Databases: PostgreSQL, Firebase
• Testing: Rspec, Jasmine, Jest, Self-built framework

• Spent one year leading the Banqueting team. Team of 4 chefs doing large prestigious events.
• Managed and mentored the junior chef’s.
• Worked closely with other departments to ensure the events ran smoothly.

In my last two years I set up and opened a private members restaurant - The MCR restaurant

• High levels of time management and planning are involved in the setting up of the restaurant. This led to a smooth opening of the restaurant with the standards increasing at a consistent level.
• Junior staff got promoted through my mentorship.
• Regular team meetings to help the team evolve and the business to grow. All staff were encouraged to bring ideas to the table on all aspects of the business.
• During the pandemic we had to change the business model to allow for a takeaway/delivery service.

• Supported the head chef with managing the kitchen and took the lead when he wasn’t available.
• Worked closely with the production chef to ensure recipes were costed accurately and updated regularly.
• Mentored the junior chefs, encouraging them to create dishes for the menu to help with their development.

I have always worked as a part of a team and have a great appreciation of teamwork and team success. Working and learning together is fundamental for the team and individual growth. I listen to team members expectations and ideas while taking ownership of my tasks. Collaborating while pair programming was a huge learning experience at Makers as I paired most days through the course.

The key to any team’s success. At Makers, I’ve learnt about the Agile process, which is very similar to how I have worked in previous roles with regular meetings and discussions where all team members can share their ideas in an open discussion. During the group projects at Makers leading standups, retros, updating Trello boards and assigning tasks to my team members also helped give me a better understanding of leadership within a software development role.

In kitchens, tasting the food regularly and often is second nature to me. I find with coding the mindset of testing fits very well with this process so TDD felt like a natural progression. Recent process review screenshot below.

From my experience of entering cooking competitions, where you have a set time to produce a menu from scratch, I’ve gained great insight into working efficiently and thorough planning. Using the skills I’ve gained from these experiences to always question whether there are better ways to cook certain ingredients and consistently aim to work more efficiently. Taking these skills back to work, I got my team into the habit of asking themselves is this the best way? How can I be more efficient? Why did I do it that way? And asking for feedback. Through my mentorship, this process became second nature to the team and as a result, I was able to take a step back from the kitchen and focus more on the business, the team had more time to focus on recipe development plus the quality and service improved in the restaurant.

I’m developing a great understanding of the creative process involved in good programming, by figuring out solutions, thinking outside the box and isolating the issues. During the final project at Makers, deciding to use Firebase when a new version had recently been released was an interesting experience as 99% of the tutorials online were out of date so we had to dive deep into Firebase docs to find solutions to our problems, while also getting acquainted with a NoSQL database for the first time. I love the creativity involved in working through problems.

Craft Guild of Chefs National Chef of the Year, Semi-Finalist 2014/15/19

• Fantastic opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and cook against some of the best chefs in the UK.
• High level of organisation, planning and focus is needed in the competition.

Crisis at Christmas

• Over Christmas, I volunteer with Crisis, a homeless charity and help with the running and organising of the kitchens. Main duties involved:
• Managing the volunteers, making sure everyone is enjoying the experience.
• Food hygiene rules were being followed.
• Service runs smoothly and on time.
• Food is delicious and the guests are happy.

Le Cordon Bleu School London March 08 - August 08

• After working as a chef for a couple of years I decided to take my career a step further and join the prestigious school.

• Rock climbing keeps me busy and I enjoy going away on trips up in the Peak District or North Wales with friends.
• Cooking and eating all the food, love cooking for people and going out to restaurants.