I started my career working in hospitality. Throughout my 12 years in the industry I learned a lot about communication within a team, decision making in high pressure situations, and problem solving. I worked in a variety of venues, in either a supervisory or a managerial position.

It had been an aspiration of mine to work in the IT and Computer Science industry, and after successfully reprogramming several till systems in my role I realised I had an aptitude for technology.

I began my HND in Computer Games Programming at Edinburgh College right away, and immediately enjoyed learning all about programming. The first language I learned was C#, specifically using it with the XNA Framework and Unity Game Engine. This provided me with a very solid foundation and from there I taught myself JavaScript, HTML and CSS and used those to get my first job designing and building eLearning games as a Multimedia Digital Designer for Flow Hospitality Learning, based in Edinburgh.

I wanted to formalise my learning further, by gaining knowledge and skills around the best practices in a development team, including the use of GitHub, testing, branching strategies, Agile/Scrum processes etc. and to work as part of a larger development team. I moved to the Tech Team at Flow to begin work as a Front-end Developer, although I was still mostly self taught as this point I managed to settle into the workflow very quickly, and my first project was a major redesign of the client managment platform. I designed the portal website in Adobe XD and built it all using a combination of Bootstrap 4 and jQuery for the front-end, paired mostly with Django Rest Framework provided by the Back-end Developers in the team. A large part of my responsibilities at this time was to present the work of the team every two weeks to the rest of the Tech Team, the Product Board, the CTO and the CEO.

Last year I took on the new challenge of becoming a Full-Stack Developer. I felt that I had learned a lot of new skills in my previous positions and enjoyed them immensely, but I really wanted to learn Python and be able to work on and understand any part of the codebase that needed to be looked at.

In my spare time, I enjoy running and staying fit. I try to eat healthy but that's a bit of a challenge with all the great restaurants and bars in Edinburgh. I am currently working on a couple of side project games with some friends that we're hoping to release soon, built in Unity using C#.