When I first began at Redgate I had the chance to work closely with Oracle, something that has given me a broader perspective on database technologies. I have also gained a greater appreciation of the role that UX and design play in software when I was part of a team who were updating a UI as part of a UI consistency project.

At Redgate I have had the chance to experience some of the many ways in which technical knowledge can be shared, including pair programming, discussion groups, lightning talks and blog posts. I also had the opportunity to coach a test engineer in software development, something I particularly enjoyed.

During my time at Amigo, the business was constantly changing and adapting to market conditions. This meant we were constantly updating and improving the business systems.

We systematically worked our way through every part of the business, refining the business process and supporting software so the business could function more efficiently. We used a microservices approach, breaking down the business functionality into a large number of services, each with clear and well defined responsibilities. I particularly enjoyed architectural discussions around how different services should interact and the implications of different approaches.

I was responsible for supporting the external APIs made available to business partners that integrated with our systems. This required me to be able to effectively communicate with people from outside the business about technical details and how it related to business objectives.

I spent a lot of time working on the People system, this system required me to build a database that allowed all new loan applications to be fuzzy matched instantly to tens of millions of existing customer records.

I would help other developers troubleshoot performance problems, particularly optimising database queries and tuning database workloads; work that I found very satisfying.

As the lead developer at Ratio I was responsible for ensuring that the development standards met the needs of the business. This included making sure that all software had an appropriate architecture, as well as ensuring that code and quality standards were met.

I was also responsible for ensuring that all our websites and systems never had significant periods of downtime. I would discuss software designs with developers to ensure that the requirements had been met and that the software would be simple to maintain. I would perform code reviews for developers and pair program with them when they were new to a codebase.

I was the main technical point of contact for our external APIs and would often discuss what was possible technically when it comes to integrating with business partners. I also discussed how these integrations should be implemented with members of their technical team.

As a side project, I developed a number of systems that provide monitoring and alerting in order to improve performance and uptime metrics. This included an alerting wallboard that would display errors from every software system across the business. It would also send email or sms alerts if the error was severe enough. I also created a news feed style interface for the system. It provided visibility of important operations being performed by the system allowing us to see when something was not quite right. I also developed a number of reporting interfaces for displaying tables, charts and graphs of important business and technical metrics. These systems allowed us to react quickly when there was a problem so it could be resolved sooner.

Having taken a few months off work to travel the world I came back to the company I helped found. In the time I had been gone, the company had managed to grow to the point where it was ready to take on an extra person. I returned with three years commercial experience looking to grow the software side of the business.

My main project was to build a ticket booking system for a small music festival (The Rockabilly Rave). The system allowed customers to make a booking, took card payments and allowed staff to manage the attendance list.

In my first job working alongside other professional engineers I learned how to build software as part of a team and began to understand how development processes guide how software is built and ensure the required standards are met. I became the most senior engineer in the management software department, helping to mentor those with less experience.

When I left university, I founded FITSystems with two friends from school. Our business plan was to offer IT support and software development services to businesses that were too small to have their own in-house teams. This experience taught me a lot about what is required to start a business and about some of the difficulties involved in making a business work.