LinkedIn | Programming Blog | Education | Projects | Skills | Experience | Hobbies and Interests | Volunteering Award

Makers Academy and Cambridge linguistics grad, aspirational junior developer, classical musician, former teacher. Looking for work contributing to meaningful, intellectually stretching projects in an environment that catalyses continuous learning.

Makers' 16-week bootcamp taught me a gamut of technical and other topics, which I detail under Education.

Using accelerate.io's tech tests to get a metric of my abilities straight out of the bootcamp:
Report (and compared to all other candidates):

• Fast delivery pace. (Clock Time <= 1h 10m)
• Great attention to detail. (Penalty <= 0m)
• Complete test coverage. (Test Coverage = 100%)

• As a teacher, first of English as a foreign language and later of musical instruments, empathy (cognitive and emotional) was vital to the relationship. One engaging aspect of the job was the challenge of placing the conceptual stepping stones at optimal intervals so that my students could bridge the gap between state A and state B (or A′), transmuting a hard problem into a series of individually simple steps.

• Feedback is a core value, which I give gladly and request often. While at Kinder, my line-manager was impressed with my constructive criticism of their research process, and asked me to write it up into a blog post on their site summarizing some of the science behind, and highlighting some potential drawbacks of, their vetting framework.
• I'm at my happiest when working in an autonomous team to which I can meaningfully contribute and where I can take on responsibility, something that occurs at the right scale of musical ensembles. I founded several of these, and hence laid firm foundations in team-playing: respecting one another, investing in relationships, giving and receiving feedback.
• Makers was an excellent environment in which to hone collaborative skills such as pair-programming, and I appreciated the prioritisation of process over making a superficially flashy product. My teams worked extremely well together, holding daily standups, planning 2-day sprints, and striving for honest communication and rapid feedback. I have continued to hone my collaborative skills since then by pair-programming an ecosystem simulator and through my remote collaboration on the EA Hub team.

A top value. I'm highly motivated to iteratively improve through a mix of practice (side-projects), study, and meetups. For example, I'm currently diving into the fast.ai course on Deep Learning with the Effective Altruism London tech meetup. By applying my knowledge of effective learning from experience both as a teacher, and as a Master's (Distinction) student of classical clarinet and a 2.1 Cambridge grad, I maximize the velocity of absorption.

I'm practical-minded, preferring to be proactive over reactive. Here are a couple of small examples.

• During onboarding as a volunteer for SoGive, I was conscious that the founder was giving up his afternoon. I therefore asked to audio-record the process, and transcribed it into a document to be sent to new volunteers.
• At the Royal Academy of Music, there weren't many reasons, besides the bar, for players in different departments to get to know each other. That's why I founded the Book Club, which is where I met my best friends at that time.
• When I sang in Arcadian Singers, there was a dearth of music by women, even among living composers. I suggested and organised our Women Composers' Competition, which received over 30 entries.

I learned my trade at Makers Academy's 16-week coding bootcamp.

• Essential pragmatic web development and software skills:
  • Object-Oriented Programming in Ruby, Rails, JavaScript
  • Test-Driven Development with RSpec, Jasmine
  • Model-View-Controller architecture
  • Writing RESTful APIs (Rails)
  • Databases: SQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL
  • Continuous Integration
  • Algorithmic complexity (e.g. 'Big-O' notation)
  • Responsive web design in React
• Essential 'soft' skills:
  • How to collaborate effectively without a project manager
  • Agile development and XP
  • Pair-programming
  • How to review code and give/receive feedback
  • Creating a growth mindset through a feedback loop of achievement -> self-concept -> achievement

Rethink Charity (April 2019 to present)
Contract and voluntary work as a developer

• I built an app for RC in a language (Python) and with frameworks (Django, unittest) not touched on by the Makers course, iterating on feedback from the client.
• After proving myself, I was invited to join the volunteer tech team working on the EA Hub website.

Kinder (July-August 2018)
Charity analysis intern

• I applied Kinder's vetting framework on organizational competence to charities on their platform, and gave feedback to the company on their vetting framework, which showcased their self-reflective processes well enough that they decided to publish it in blog form.

Freelance clarinettist and singer (2015-2018)

• Outside of my performing groups, I specialised in Creative Learning Participation: empowering people living with dementia, children with Special Educational Needs, and other groups to express themselves creatively.

Matrix Music School (March 2015 to December 2018)
Instrumental Teacher

• With my LRAM in teaching, I taught children and adults to love to play the clarinet and piano.

Oxford School of English (Sep-Nov 2014, June-July 2015)

• With my CELTA, I taught English as a Foreign Language at one of the city's most popular EFL schools.

I write music and play in orchestras, do life-drawing, play puzzle games, and listen to podcasts on too many topics (genetics, world politics, philosophy, rationality, psychology, altruism, economics, futurism, comedy). Here are a couple of blogs: programming, fiction/eclectica.

In 2017 I won a Westminster Community Young Volunteer Award for voluntary work with people living with dementia.