Projects List | Skills | Experience | Education | Hobbies and Interests

My coding journey began with my passion for the gaming industry and my involvement in an eSports tournament at university. This sparked my interest in PC building which served as a gateway into coding where my interest extended beyond physical hardware and into the software at the heart of technology.

The pandemic allowed me to invest more time into my existing hobbies and it helped me to discover just how satisfying programming could be. This made me rethink my previous career path and gave me the push I needed to take coding from a pastime hobby and turn it into a career and make that change into the tech industry. As a recent graduate of Makers bootcamp and with my background in customer relations and quality assurance as a former New Homes Officer, I am a highly motivated, goal orientated self starter and aspiring frontend developer.

I pride myself in my team working ability and collaboration skills. My previous role at Peabody had a strong focus on collaboration which resonated with my core values. When working with others or in a team, it is crucial that you understand your own limits as well as who you’re working with and their approach to working. Whilst at Peabody, so that we met our KPIs and guaranteed that our end of year targets were met, I would set time aside from my own schedule to help my team with onsite visits and snagging. By assisting my team I am helping myself by learning to manage my time better and improve our customer’s overall experience.

Being collaborative is learning to work well with others, something that I brought with me to Makers. During projects, I demonstrated the ability to understand those I was working with, so that we could come together and produce good quality code. From this, I learnt that sometimes the best way to collaborate is to break away from the team to consolidate learning before coming back and contributing at a higher level.

Communication is an essential part of any role, this is a skill I have developed over time throughout my professional and personal life. In order to succeed, I believe that you must be open and communicative with all parties involved. My role at Peabody was primarily defect management, this meant that I would often be the liaison between the company, the developers and the customers with any issues that came up with my buildings. In order to keep my customers happy, clear communications with regular updates to ensure that the customer had everything they needed for peace of mind.

My time at Makers reinforced my belief as I found that opening up that dialogue during challenging moments is the best way to identify issues and provide solutions that work for everyone. This was particularly effective during pair programming and regular stand ups during projects whereby I employed Agile working practices to help improve communication which led to better collaboration and ultimately more successes.

As a New Homes Officer, I was given the opportunity to hone my attention to detail skills as I was responsible for ensuring that the final product was to the highest standard to maximise customer satisfaction. I set the standard of quality that would be used throughout the whole development phase, it was vital that I was patient and meticulous when setting that benchmark, not only would this mean a better standard for the client but it also meant that developers had less leeway to reject any potential snags that could affect the overall quality of the build. This required me to develop a good working knowledge of the different elements of the development and construction industry, so that I could better identify any issues.

At Makers, this skill was crucial whilst learning to code, especially as most bugs often came from simple things such as spelling errors or misplaced curly brackets. Taking that time to go over my code and understanding error messages allowed me to debug my code to a proficient standard. When tackling a new technology, I transferred this mindset into learning new things and making sure I had a firm grasp on the foundations to minimise errors. This ensures that I always follow best practices in the tasks that I tackle.

At Peabody, I spearheaded projects to improve training resources to new starters, this involved breaking the project up into several smaller deadlines, utilising my team and department as a key resource for sections that proved challenging. When tackling a new project, I need to make sure that I have a firm grasp of the goal ahead, but also, through my high level of self-awareness, acknowledge my strengths and weaknesses.

The Makers experience allowed me to improve upon this skill. I sought to focus on adaptability and maintaining a flexible mindset throughout the process by recognising that the path to my goal is not always a straight line. When tackling a large problem, I would use the Pomodoro technique to pace myself and Trello to break my goals down into manageable chunks and ask myself, “what can I do right now?”. This mentality helped me to not only stay motivated, but by also allowing me to prioritise what needs my attention and achieve results.

Whilst at university, I held a Customer Assistant role at Tescos which provided a strong foundation to further develop my customer relation skills at Peabody. In my role as a Customer Assistant, it was my responsibility to ensure that customers were left satisfied, I achieved this by utilising my communication skills to create a positive experience for my customers.

During my time at Peabody, I brought my customer focussed mindset with me and spearheaded a project during the initial stages of the pandemic to provide additional support to residents by creating and editing a video demonstration resource (something I had not done before) when onsite visits were postponed. The aim was to improve accessibility for customers, with the final goal for this project to have translated versions of the video for households where English was not their first language. Being bilingual, I looked at how I could improve my existing work using my language skills. Before leaving my previous role, I had translated the script into Spanish and handed the project to my team.

Foreign languages which include: fluent Spanish, proficient German and conversational Japanese

Peabody (2018 - 2021)

• Defect reporting and scheme management across several developments
• Design and implementation of quality of life resources for the team
• Managing multiple relations with both internal and external stakeholders
• Identifying and collating crucial legal documents
• Assessing outdated resources and streamlining processes for customers and colleagues

Tesco (2014 - 2018)

• Coordination of departmental workload to help streamline productivity
• Delivery organisation, clearance and management
• Customer service and relations – always putting the customer first
• Regular training and knowledge sharing to stay up to date with current company changes and policies to meet store KPIs

Throughout projects we employed Agile working practices to encourage a collaborative work environment, allowing the team to be adaptable and team focussed whilst maintaining a sense of autonomy

Whilst at Makers, I learnt OOP and SRP and employed these practices into my weekly projects. Overall, these helped to better my understanding of how code interacts with one another and improved the quality of code I was able to produce.

By implementing a red, green, refactor development cycle, I was able to keep control of my code as well as keeping it clean. By making sure my code was well tested and working as expected, I could break down my challenges into manageable sections and better my understanding of what I was writing and where I needed to move onto.

Pair programming added a new style of working to my repertoire and bettered my attention to detail, communication and collaboration skills. By working closely with my peers I developed a better understanding of how they worked as well as discovering how I worked and how I could improve myself.

Javascript, React, Jest, HTML and CSS

Ruby, Rails, RSpec, Sinatra, PostgreSQL, Bootstrap

A blog where I share my frustrations and lessons learnt, documenting this quite terrifying, but exciting journey

The product of said journey here

• BA Social Anthropology

• UKC Aikido (2015 - 2017)

  • President (2016 - 2017)
    • Allowed me to test my teamwork and leadership skills through discussion and micro/macro managing of the committee
    • Successfully increased membership numbers from previous years due to positive representation at key events
    • Successful negotiations and discussions with companies to obtain sponsorship deals
    • Liaising with instructors to organise grading events or demonstrations
  • Social Secretary (2015 - 2016)
    • Developed event organisation skills which helped with issues such as catering to individual’s dietary and religious requirements
    • Engaging in negotiations with the university to secure specific locations to accommodate specific events
    • Working in tandem with our health and safety officer to ensure that the correct procedure was followed when an individual was injured or sick
    • Promoted inclusivity and group participation

• NUEL Team Captain (2017 - 2018)

  • Leading a team in a co-operative, team-based game at a national tournament level provided a test of organisation and leadership skills
  • Encouraged regular meetings to discuss practice times and tactics for upcoming matches
  • As shot-caller, decisions had to be made correctly without hesitation as any mistake could lead to a loss for the team
  • Mediating between conflicting personalities, encouraging open discussion and friendly team building games to resolve the conflict

• Hiking: Nothing better than the satisfaction of a challenging hike and the reward of a beautiful view.
• PC building: Such a fun puzzle, I'm constantly tinkering with my current rig!
• Skiing: Exhilarating sport coupled with those views, I never want to leave!
• Languages: Fascinating insight into culture and a great communication tool.