Projects | Skills | Education | Employment and Experience | Blurb |
Web Developer
I am a Housing Support worker turned developer who cares about having a positive impact on the end-user’s life, and enjoys working with others to find creative solutions to challenges faced. I am loyal, seriously hard working, set high standards for whatever job I do, am able to work well with others; and most importantly I love bringing laughter to the people I work with. I am looking for a role where I can continue to develop my skills, to be part of building things that change people's lives, and want to work for a company that cares for it's staff's wellbeing.
For a complete list, please visit my GitHub.
| Project | Description | Technologies | Testing |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChoreMatick | An Amazon Alexa skill for parents to set their child chores; watch our 'advert' here. | Java 8, Alexa Skills Kit, AWS Lambda and DynamoDB | JUnit, Mockito and Codeship |
| Instagram-Clone | An Instagram-clone website created in a 2 day period. For deployed website: Gonna Post y'all | Rails, AWS S3, omniauth-Facebook & Heroku | Rspec & Capybara |
Communication
I believe that one of my key transferable skills is my ability to communicate with people. I have over a decade's experience of working alongside professionals from various organisations, and in a variety of settings. This includes attending multiagency case discussions, giving reports at Child Protection Meetings and attending court hearings to advocate for young people. Whilst at Makers there was a focus on pair programming and this allowed me to work collaboratively with a wide range of people and develop the skills needed to make this a success - such as actively listening and swapping navigator/driver roles regularly.
Working under pressure & being able to prioritise workloads
My previous roles required working with individuals and families at the point of crisis. I am used to working within strict timescales; information gathering; making detailed assessments; prioritising complex needs to be fulfilled by limited budgets and negotiating best outcomes with a range of supporting organisations. I am able to analyse information and situations easily and have strong communication skills which I’m able to apply to a diverse range of people.
Creative Thinker
Working in a Social Care environment means designing tailored plans for each client and negotiating the best outcomes for them. There were often limited resources and a range of professionals who had to fulfil their own criterial; this meant a focus on being able to come up with creative solutions that balanced everyone's needs/pressures. In addition to this, during our final project at Makers we were faced with the issue that the Alexa system doesn't have voice recognition, so I implemented a pin code system that generated a security code for each chore.
Makers Academy is Europe's leading Web Developer bootcamp; a 16 week intensive course supporting students to learn the principles of code craftsmanship.
Agile working practices, XP values & pair programming
OOP - Ruby, Javascript, Rails and Java
TDD - Rspec, Jasmine, Capybara and JUnit
Version control via GitHub
Other areas covered - AWS (S3, Lambda, DynamoDB & Alexa Skills Kit), Sintara, Heroku, command line, Postgres, HTML and CSS.
- 2.1 Youth and Community Studies (BA Hons)
Royal Borough of Greenwich (Oct 2013 to Sept 2016)
Housing Options and Support Officer (1st Base - Young People's Team)
- Assessing young people aged 16-25 who presented as homeless, or at risk of homelessness, and with other complex needs e.g. mental health issues, substance misuse, experiencing/witnessing domestic violence, gang members, and so forth.
- Working with families with the aim of returning young people home to their parents; where this was not possible then making recommendations as to where best to house them.
St Christopher's (Jun 2006 to Sept 2013)
Support Officer / Team Leader
- Role of Support Officer included working with the same range of service users as my Housing and Support worker job.
- Team Leader -- Managing a staff team of six for two years involving managing poor performance, poor attendance and redundancy; completing quarterly monitoring statistics, and liaising with partner agencies on a daily basis.
I have been interested in tech from a young age; I was lucky enough to have a nerdy dad and have taken after him. Whilst planning on a career in tech during my school years, I did some volunteering one summer and took the opportunity to start a career in Social Care instead. I loved that in Social Care you never knew what each day was going to bring you, even if you thought you had a plan in place! As a developer the excitement comes from knowing that the code I write is having a positive impact for users, and that I'll never stop learning.
- My big life achievement was travelling and working around Australia and New Zealand for 18 months.
- I love gaming, binge watching great tv shows and enjoy a few ends of bowls.