I am currently working as the Curriculum Lead for the Software Engineering Immersive course at General Assembly’s London Campus. My role consists of training groups of non-technical adults from all walks of life to be entry-level engineers in 3 months. Part of my role includes taking charge of the local curriculum, updating the existing materials as well as introducing new content. I have also trained junior instructors to be ready to lead their own cohorts.
Before joining General Assembly I worked at a small digital agency and as a freelance web developer. The projects I have worked on have ranged from small boutique portfolio sites, to large web applications with large volumes of users.
I am looking for a new challenge as a mid-weight developer in a team where I can grow as a web developer and engineer. I am particularly interested in working for a company that aims to improve our society either through education or positive environmental impact.
I started working at General Assembly as an Instructor, which focused on teaching cohorts of between 10 - 25 adult students who are looking to transition from their existing jobs into web development. It is a bootcamp style course which lasts 12 weeks and students are expected to work 12 hour days for the entirety of the course. I have now taught roughly 300 students. I am proud to know that ~90% of them are now working in the tech sector.
The role helped me to develop leadership skills, project management, mentorship, patience and preparedness. During my time as a lead instructor I also learned Ruby, Sinatra, Ruby on Rails, Angular 1, gulp, React, Vue, Python and Flask, as well as deepening my understanding of Node.js, Express and git.
After two years I became curriculum lead and made significant changes to the curriculum which helped to reduce stress, increase enjoyment and confidence whilst still achieving excellent conversion for students from the classroom to the workplace. Predominantly this revolved around improving the flow of the course with more emphasis on fundamentals, as well as introducing more TDD practices.
I have helped to improve the process of the Admissions team with technical and Q&A sessions to give them a greater understanding of the course as a product. I have also worked closely with the Outcomes team to help integrate the important work that they do into the curriculum and improve student experience.
As a freelance Web Developer I worked either on my own or in multidisciplinary teams to create modern, creative solutions for a wide range of problems from very corporate clients to smaller startups.
Working as a freelancer taught me to manage my workflow effectively and to build a strong relationship with my clients. I also had to learn to manage my brand and the administrative side of working for myself.
Most recently I have worked on Moveli.co.uk, an online estate agency. I have fostered a close relationship with the founders, and aside from developing their platform I have also trained and mentored their current developer.
The platform is built using React, Express and MongoDB, with Webpack as a build tool. I also set up the deployment pipeline using git, so that the site can be deployed either to staging or live with one command.
I began my Web Development career at Everywhere Digital, a small and dynamic agency based in East London, which has sadly now ceased trading. I started as an intern after teaching myself JavaScript and PHP.
I learned a huge amount during my three years there. I worked closely with the founders as well as project manager and design team.
I worked on a wide range of projects for clients including Davina McCall, Nike and Oxford Brookes University.
I wanted a way to teach students React without the need for a backend, so I developed a package called react-local-mongoose. It attempts to match mongooses API, but instead of connecting to a database it uses local storage as the persistence layer.
The project is published on npm and enjoys a reasonable amount of weekly downloads. It has extensive documentation and is fully tested.
Frontend Mentor is a platform designed to help aspiring engineers develop their frontend skills by providing them with visual designs for them to build out with HTML, CSS and client side JavaScript.
The platform has a thriving community which provide feedback to users on their efforts. We are currently working on incorporating a premium offering which provides users with detailed reports on accessibility and CSS and HTML validity.
The platform is built using Next.js and React on the client side and Node.js, Express and MongoDB on the client side. My work has been exclusively on the server side, incorporating a number of 3rd party APIs including GitHub, Cloudinary and Nodemailer.
My focus has been on the back end, which is fully tested using Mocha, Chai and Supertest.
Over the years I have built a number of grid-based games using vanilla JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Whilst primarily for fun, they have been a great way to deepen my understanding of JavaScript and to experiment with different patterns and approaches.
I founded a successful Darkness tribute band in the early 00s. Yes I dressed up. No, not in a leotard (I was the bass player). I also enjoy playing table tennis, rock climbing and ultimate frisbee. I support Arsenal football club, and I grow tomatoes on my balcony.
