I am a Junior Software Engineer who has accrued diverse experience in a variety of other roles, including working for the picture desk of a national newspaper, in marketing for a chain of restaurants, for myself as a freelance translator, and more recently, in the voluntary sector as both an employee and a volunteer.
My interest was first piqued when, during the pandemic, WFH meant sharing a workspace with a software engineer. This gave me an invaluable insight into the profession and its processes - stand-ups, sprints, retros etc. As someone who is motivated by effective collaboration, high performance, and continuous learning and improvement, this approach to work was very attractive.
However, having enjoyed a humanities path ever since choosing A Levels, it didn't initially occur to me that I might equally enjoy a STEM career—despite having also had an aptitude for and interest in these subjects at school. And so a couple of years passed before, to meet the requirements of a job vacancy asking for experience of HTML and JavaScript, I turned to Codecademy and found I very much enjoyed it. Around the same time, some personality testing via my university's careers service also suggested the field would be a very good fit for me. All signs now seemed to point to software engineering, and so I took the plunge and enrolled on General Assembly's immersive bootcamp. It was fantastic to be back in a learning environment and to be really challenged by something totally new. I am looking forward to starting out, and to continuing to learn and improve throughout my career. I hope to secure a position working with fun people who are serious about what they do, where I will be supported and encouraged to understand my new craft inside out.
As a colleague, I think I'm good at asking the right questions and at looking ahead to forestall problems. Being a linguist, I'm a clear, adaptable communicator. With a background in written translation, I pride myself on (and often bore other people with) my attention to detail.
With my bootcamp successfully completed, I am embracing the opportunity to consolidate what I've learned so far and to broaden/deepen my understanding of the discipline. I am currently working through Harvard's introduction to computer science, CS50x. Other resources I enjoy include Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent JavaScript, Eric Matthes' Python Crash Course, Codecademy, and the TLDR newsletter. I also subscribe to a number of podcasts, and I especially liked this episode of CoRecursive.
One of my main interests is languages, and having studied French and Spanish as my degree, I have also been teaching myself Italian for a number of years. I work daily to maintain and improve my languages using a wide variety of resources—everything from Duolingo to podcasts, YouTube, fiction, Netflix, and conversations with learners of English. As a Duolingo fanatic, I am currently using it to learn Ukrainian, Polish and Welsh, too! I am always happy and motivated to learn independently. I also love to read, and am a member of my university's alumni book group.
Technologies I have experience with include:
I completed General Assembly's Software Engineering Bootcamp between January and April 2024. As part of the course, I built four projects:
Using DOM manipulation, I built a grid-based browser version of 80s arcade game Frogger in HTML, CSS and JavaScript across 6 business days (8 in total). My main challenges included animating the obstacles and detecting collisions with my player character. My stretch goals included a high score display and increasing the difficulty as the game progresses.
With a partner, I produced a React quiz app with TypeScript over a two-day hackathon. Our app consumed the Open Trivia public API, used React Router, and was styled with the Bulma CSS framework. We mostly pair-programmed, taking turns as driver/navigator.
Our group of three built a full-stack “bootcamp advice” app over one week, using MongoDB, Express, React/TypeScript and Node.js. My contributions to the project included providing the concept, implementing UI, writing some of the key logic for our CRUD functionality and producing some of the form validation and error handling.
For my final project, I worked solo to build a full-stack “community groups” app over 8 business days (12 in total). I used a Python Flask API with Flask REST framework to serve my data from a Postgres database. I built my frontend with React/TypeScript. The project has CRUD functionality, with various models and a mix of one-to-many and many-to-many relationships.
