_{TLDR - I'm a software developer, hire me, I'll make cool stuff for you!}

I've been working in tech for exactly 17 years as of today o_O

I realise though that tech has been a part of my life much, much longer. Plugging in that first Atari 65XE with a turbo cartridge set me on a path which, even though meandered through various landscapes, inevitably always lead to technology.

Along the way I've tried on a few different hats from support, through to IT management and sysadmin to project management. For the vast majority of my career I've settled on technical project management as the role seemed to best describe the balance of technical and non-technical skills I would offer my clients to help them build, transform and do amazing things.

During this period I had the pleasure of being entrusted to deliver some of the most challenging and cutting edge projects like:

• Migrating 5.7 billion customer photos from physical storage to AWS S3
• Designing, building and implementing Okta IAM system with HR Lifecycle Management
• Complete overhaul of corporate services with Hyper Converged Infrastructure

Lifetime friendships were formed, battle scars were made and great things were achieved but with every new project the technical part of the job title became less of a priority. I found myself spending more and more of my time managing budgets, comms and business analysis. The path started meandering again.

I realised that the parts of the projects which made me excited have little to do with project management. I found myself building workflows, writing scripts, solving technical issues, doing data migrations and writing API calls instead of delegating these tasks as any PM would. At the root of this there was an old familiar feeling of discovery. With every attempt at building something useful I felt like a new layer was peeled.

Here's a picture of a derpy cat to break up this wall of text

Few months back I finished a contract with one of my clients, something snapped and I finally made a decision to explore what makes me excited about tech - software development.

Fantastic time to do it as well! With breakthroughs in LLMs driving a large chunk of the software dev world into an irrational existential crisis, Silicon Valley adjusting to pre-pandemic headcount numbers this is an interesting time to jump on to the ladder but... I am determined

At this point I had a decent understanding about software engineering but I wanted to start this journey fresh and learn the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript. From that I progressed into studying data structures and algorithms, testing frameworks and real world Git use. Once I was confident writing working applications in JS I ventured into React and boy did that speed things up. To cover back end no pun intended technologies I concentrated on Node JS and MongoDB with Mongoose.

During these few months I was on top of the world, ready to give up, jumping from one rabbit hole to another, but with every single commit, every single app completed or part of material which would make sense I wanted to understand more. That old itch of curiosity was being scratched.

At first my code was sometimes sloppy and badly optimized becasue I'm eager to get a working example, but with every iteration it gets better, cleaner and more robust and it feels really good!

I thought that the skills I've picked up throughout my career will be a baggage on this new journey buy the more I explore the world of software development the more I realise that the foundations are the same. I can truly say that all the work I've put into learning about software development made me appreciate working with tech again. And with that...

Hire me! I'll make cool stuff for you!