A musical campervan
In early 2024, with 3 years of Software Engineering experience under my belt at some fantastic companies I left my job, my work and my home in a 1992 Talbot Express AutoQuest to pursue busking, nature and the open road. I had some good times, and some downright desperate times as busking became progressively more difficult, but ultimately I made some great memories, saw some fantastic places I never would have known about in the UK, and learnt a lot about how van life can be.
Some time away from work gave me some great insights, mainly I realised that I have many skills to be grateful for alongside Web Development, such as: Art, Music, Photo Editing and Digital Marketing. So I set to work creating this website, to showcase the full arsenal of my skills and seek out unique opportunities that speak to me.
Programmed to deliver
My interest in software development began with side-projects. I progressed through a fantastic course called Learn Python the Hard Way with a simple dream of developing an app for signing up to 5-a-side football games for my friends.
I never finished the app, but the passion that this course imbued in me for solving problems led me to go to University to study Computing at the University of Suffolk. Witnessing the mind-bendingly intricate mechanisms of computers, a textured history of the internet and coursemates building game engines got me hooked on writing code.
Professionally, I made my humble beginnings in a Web Development agency called Scandiweb (based in Riga, Latvia) where I cut my teeth in the Magento ecosystem, and progressed up the ranks to prestigious clients.
When I came back to the UK I started working for Shopware AG, a German Software provider who supply ecommerce solutions as competitor to Adobe’s Magento. With many team events and a much higher standard of coding, including Automated Testing, CI/CD and Static analysis checking I felt like an man in the presence of giants, but I as I slowly got to grips with each part of the Shopware product I progressed to a confidence in the company, contributing to many of the AI-Copilot features now seen in the product today.
This Portfolio
This Portfolio site is built upon Hugo a golang based Static-Site builder, using the Papermod theme. With my profile card which you can see above I have attached a wide range of links to my profiles on various sites, such as:
- medium - A .site for publishing guides, opinion pieces, some types of journalistic writing
- github - A site for displaying and collaborating on open-source code repositories.
- linkedin - My career profile can be seen on here, including professional experience.
- stackoverflow - My profile on popular Q&A site ‘stackoverflow’