About Me
I am an enthusiastic entry level developer based in Northern Ireland, with a range of experience attained through Degree Study and Home Learning.
First and foremost, I am a family man ..
I am a 50 something married man with children. I also have a full time job, a mortgage, a sensible car and a dog called Harvey.
.. with a full-time job.
I currently work for BT UK in a non software related role, working in a contact center answering 999 emergency calls. Sounds interesting, but currently no software development experience opportunities.
Although I did pick up a couple of years experience with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Building a lot of Macros and automating tasks which was a lot of fun.
I have a Computer Science Honors Degree ..
Yeah, sometimes I surprise myself. This took me a total of 10 years to complete, part time and with the odd break.
It was worth it though as I gained a lot of knowledge about how software is developed, from the requirements document through to testing and deployment, including all the use cases, model diagrams, interaction diagrams and all the other stuff in the middle.
I used a lot of tools and languages over this time, working with HTML, CSS, C++, XML, XHTML, UML and VB6, although my degree focused mainly on software development and Object Oriented Programming with Java
.. and a lot of Home Study
Since my degree I have also self taught myself Python, Django, and WordPress, while also using HTML and CSS more while integrating some Javascript, Bootstrap and SQL.
Currently I use Visual Studio and Eclipse for my development, and am continuing to self teach using Free Code Camp and practice using Exercism.
Ohh.. I also draw a lot, pencil portraits.
Which you can check out at:
My Skills
I believe learning is a continuous journey and learning new technologies and programming languages excites me. I am always striving to be a better programmer than my current skill set allows, and to use my skill set to help others.
My Experience
Self Teaching
Since completing my degree I have not been successful in gaining a role to suit my skillset. So I have continued to self-teach, gaining experience in working with Python, Django, Visual Studio, Eclipse, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and I have built some websites, web-apps and standalone Java apps.
Computer Science Degree
Studying at home, around a full time job and a family with 7 children I completed this Honours Degree over a 10 year period. For financial reasons I had to take a break from study, following achievement of the Diploma in Computer Science. After 2 years I returned to complete the final 3 years of the degree.
Excel Reporting
Working within different roles in customer service the main experience that lead me to programming was with becoming extremely proficient in using microsoft word, excel and powerpoint. In specific using Visual Basic for Applications to automate daily tasks and build reports.