About
How I got here.
I'm a senior software engineer in the UK, building event-driven systems with TypeScript, Node.js and AWS. The route here was not a straight line.
The route in
Pharmacy, SEO, then software
I studied pharmacy at Aston University for two years and left with a Diploma of Higher Education. Not the obvious start for a software engineer.
I joined Prezzybox, an online gift shop, as a marketing assistant and ended up doing SEO. Parts of the job were repetitive, so I started writing tools to do them for me. That work led to a move into the tech team.
Junior developer became software engineer, and software engineer became product lead. I led the move from AngularJS to Vue, built the personalisation pipeline behind an exclusive Mars Celebrations tub (the Bounty font had no Q, which mattered more than you'd think), and found that the marketing part of my brain was still useful. Product lead meant shaping what we built, as well as how we built it.
Since then
Full stack, then senior
At CGHero I taught myself PHP and Laravel to clear a back-end bottleneck, built real-time messaging, and rebuilt permissions so pages that hung for over a second loaded in under 100 milliseconds.
Since January 2024 I've been a senior software engineer at a ferry booking company, where I build event-driven systems on AWS. I also sit on the product team, so I help decide what engineering builds, as well as how. The longer write-ups live on the Writing page.
Away from work
Personal / Hobby project
Movie-night app
During lockdown, I made a tablet app for my children to choose a film, book pretend tickets and order snacks from the kitchen.
I hosted it on GitHub Pages. It made movie nights a little more interactive, and gave us something fun to do during isolation.
The kitchen was still the kitchen. It just had a ticketing system.
