The following is not a resume/cv, it is a meander back through some of the things I have done. If you want a copy of my resume/cv, contact me.

Recently, I have been working for Knowd, a venture capital backed Toronto-based startup. In my work at Knowd, I have been helping to build a full-stack web application in JavaScript with React/NextJS, using NLP / AI technologies to power the knowledge extraction and insights features.

Before that, I helped another early stage startup, Processboard, by setting up the backend systems, infrastructure, and CI/CD flow, as well as helping to build a React Application. Processboard is a SaaS to help manage and progressively automate processes.

Between January 2021 and September 2022, I worked as a Software Engineer for Mycs GmbH. This role was mainly based in Berlin, but I was fortunate to be able to also visit the warehouse in Szczecin and the office in Nice. This role was mainly backend-focused, but I also developed some internal tools/dashboards in React. The project I remember most fondly from my time at Mycs was a tool I built to allocate Purchase Orders to specific factories for production, using MiniZinc and the COIN-OR BC (CBC) Solver. Once I had built the logic model, I wrote an interface between MiniZinc and Go. I then wrapped the solver with a Go HTTP service on Linux + Docker, and deployed it to the AWS ECS Cluster using CloudFormation and GitHub Actions.

My first Software Engineering job was working as a Full-Stack Developer for Exel Computer Systems, in Sawley, not too far from Nottingham. I worked for them for a year between my second and third years of university (as a Sandwich Year). I greatly enjoyed my time at Exel, and I am glad that I was able to experience working pre-pandemic, even if just so I can compare before & after. I suspect that I won't ever work in a role that requires me to be in the office every day of the week again, but back then this was the norm, and remote working was the exception. Personally, my preference is for flexible hybrid.

I was not completely sure what to study at university. I had studied A-Levels in Mathematics, Further Mathematics, and Physics, and I had been playing with computers and hacking together little programs since childhood. This background (and probably also the fact that during my early childhood my father worked as a software developer), contributed towards my eventual choice to study Computer Science. I'm extremely glad I picked it, studying Computer Science was life-changing for me. One university project that particularly influenced me was building a CPU within a simulation, designing the opcode instruction set, and writing an assembler for it. That project, of all the projects I did, improved my understanding of computers the most. I realise that three years is actually quite a short period of time to learn anything serious, but in retrospect I think it was a shame we didn't touch on Lisp, and also a shame we didn't do that much on how to build operating systems (We did spend a term playing with Minux, but I don't remember having a serious assessment on this. For anyone who does want to study OS programming, take a look at xv6, which is probably a better starting point than Minux). But the course can't contain all the content in the world, and I'm not sure what I would suggest dropping to fit this content in. More importantly than any specific content, the course gave me a strong grasp of the fundementals, combined with a desire to keep learning more.

Before I moved away to university, I grew up in a village in Northamptonshire, in England. This was an idyllic place to grow up, and I remember fondly a childhood of christmas tree festivals, village fetes, building dens in the woods, compulsory morris dancing, scout camps, and cold floors.