Technology driven stoic, never ending enthusiast of working code and always smiling minimalist. Strong believer in the limitless freedom of making a 180 degrees change in a career's path at any stage of life. Social blogger, freelance journalist and Helpdesk analyst striving to be a palpable example of such change.
Looking forward to start pair-programming with you soon as a Junior Developer.
Working for HSBC, sounds great, doesn’t it? One might think it squeaks a bit when you think of a place where the latest technology should be racing with a pace of daily releases. I was lucky enough to be brought onboard with fellow Makers Academy graduates to take part in one of the latest experiment made by Nic Ferrier, who is the main force behind HSBC’s digital transformation into agile loaded clusters of software crafters. So there I was, a junior programmer hoping for the best.
In a matter of weeks, I’ve learned what agile means in a huge, international corporation. Every day started with a stand up to liaise with nominated business stakeholders to ensure business requirements are fully understood and before commencing design and development. Every two weeks we held agile retrospective at the end of an iteration of a product we’ve been building. The products I’ve been developing varied, but they were mainly foreign exchange related microservices and integrations with existing code base written in Clojure, Javascript Angular and some legacy Java allowing customers to make corporate payments using their FX products.
One of our goals as a team was to gain trust among each other to feel confident enough to share our code on a regular basis and ultimately to start delivering a more reusable software of a higher quality. To achieve that we were using pair/mob programming on a daily basis.
One of the most intensive and demanding coding bootcamp, they call themselves 'Makers Academy', was a great place to get your hands dirty with "don't ever forget about testing unless you spike", "pair-programming is fun", "code has to be clean, otherwise stinks", "don't repeat yourself, even when you're tempted" and "object-oriented programming versus functional programming".
As a result I am capable of applying SOLID and DRY principles, in a TDD fashion(Capybara, Mocha, Jasmine and Rspec), in both Ruby and Javascript, using such frameworks as Ruby on Rails, Sinatra and JQuery together with SQL and PSQL databases. (Yes, even when it rains.)
| Project | Team Size | Description | Technologies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Udacity Nanodegree Bookcase Project | 1 | Udacity first final project covering the fundamentals of React. A simple app allowing a user to manipulate the book between available shelves. | Javascript, React, Router, JSX |
| Blank_canvas | 5 | Makers Academy final project. An app allowing a person to upload a picture, extract dominant colours and apply them to blank and white SVG drawing (drag and drop) to finally be able to save the canvas as an image file. | Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Interact.js, CSS, HTML, SVG |
| Chitter | 1 | A Twitter clone | Sinatra, Ruby, HTML, CSS |
| Social_event_reminder | 5 | Makers Academy mid project. An app to connect with your family through sending and receiving reminders regarding an important family event. | Rails, Twilio API, CSS, HTML |
Having finished Makers Academy bootcamp does not only mean that as a graduate I've experience working with particular technologies. The most important ability that I've managed to enhance is multipotentiality, or adjustability if you prefer. Makers did great job in showing students how different technologies work together and allowed me to see a pattern in every language, framework or technology that can be pragmatically used, as a very efficient tool to learn and understand a new technology. Okay, maybe not in every one of them, but you get the gist, right?
This one is a fancy ability that almost everybody brings up as one of their core skills. I will be the same, but different. As a Helpdesk analyst working for a telecommunication startup I had more than a handful of opportunities to face challenging conversations with disgruntled customers. On many occasions their level of understanding technical, network-related terminology wasn't up to scratch and that's when my soft skills were taking over, so I could deliver a concise explanation with a smile. Clarity and coherence were also relevant when pair-programming with different students every day at Makers Academy for sometimes 12 hours a day.
Makers Academy is a highly selective 12 week full-time program (preceded by a four week pre-course) which teaches web development in London. Courses start every six weeks at the new Makers HQ in Shoreditch and admission is highly competitive. Makers Academy accepts only the exceptional applicants onto the course, for a rigorous program that culminates in graduation. The final week for the students is dedicated to their future ambitions.
- Master's degree - Cultural Studies - Creative Writing
- Bachelor's degree - Journalism and Social Communication
HSBC (2016-2017) Software developer
Truphone (2014 to 2016)
Helpdesk analyst/Technical support
Polish Express (2013 to 2014)
Freelance journalist