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Hey, thanks for visiting my blog, I’m Joe, a 26 year old chap from South Wales. I’m a father, a husband & a nerd, what else can I say?

About Me

I won’t drone on about my hobbies & all that nonsense, but I’m quite a laid back guy, however, I’m by no stretch of the imagination a yes man. I will give my two pence piece & I will challenge things if I disagree, obviously I don’t aim to be a pain to work with, I just want to maximise the value delivered, be that to the end user or the team I’m working in, etc.

I’m a firm believer in the agile philosophy, a joke that I like to use is that I’m not lazy, I’m agile, I’m maximising the amount of work not done! 😅 – When it comes to ways of working, I like scrum, I’m by no means a certified scrum guru, but it’s simple & easy to follow, etc. But I’m also not opinionated on ways of working, provided everyone’s happy & everyone’s on the same page, I’m happy to adapt.

If I had to give myself a title, I’d say I’m a full stack developer, I’m happy to work with whatever I’m given really. I’m comfortable with tinkering with infrastructure, networking, databases & so on. But I’d say my preference might just be the front end for the simple fact that I find you can be more creative.

I’m a firm believer in sharing knowledge, hence I why I write technical posts on this website. I hope that people find them of some value.

On another note, I want to start my own business, but I’m my own worst enemy. I shoot all of my ideas down, I look for all the potential problems & pinholes, which results in the complete lose of confidence that the business would work.

Work History

Senior Consultant – CGI
11/2022 – Present

In my current role at CGI, I get to work on all sorts of projects, from tinkering with next generation web applications, using AR & VR to provide a more immersive experience all the way through to working on some banking applications & so on. So far some of the real world projects I’ve worked on include loan management system, a fraud detection system & a GIS system. I’ve mostly used Azure, C# & all things JavaScript.

Chief Technology Officer – Docflite
02/2022 – 11/2022

I took on the role of being the chief technology officer at a local startup called QuoteOnSite, thanks to some of my ideas & opinions, one of the features that I built was so diverse the company decided to rebrand the business. I also rebuilt the document builder from scratch to provide a more word-like experience. By far, the coolest thing I built would have to be the heatmaps feature, it was hard & I managed to bash it out in a few days, but I was pretty happy with the end result.

Software Engineer – Lloyds Bank
05/2020 – 02/2021

During my time at Lloyds Banking Group, I was working as a full stack software developer within Black Horse Motor Finance. One of the biggest jobs I worked on was trying to phase out the use of 3rd party tools & products to fundamentally take more ownership & to more importantly reduce operational costs drastically. My team & I rewrote the finance online application using Node.js for the backend & React for the front end, it was a group decision to use these technologies for an array of reasons.

Software Engineer – Admiral
03/2019 – 05/2020

During my time at Admiral, I was a part of a team working taking care of a number of systems related to van insurance. My team was one of the first to migrate from on premiss to the cloud, using Azure, this was also my first time using Azure & cool tools like Docker, Kubernetes & so on. We wrote all of our applications in Java, our team mostly took care of middleware applications, so we rarely built anything that even had a front end. Although I did have the opportunity to lead the development of an internal application to help customer support staff. It was a relatively simplistic application where it would essentially allow a call handler to click through a script, each answer resulting in a different, if you were to be formal, it essentially used a tree like data structure. Given that we were working in an informal agile manner, we used forms to gain feedback early on in the development process. This was a pretty cool idea since it lead to the development of a dark theme, which is something that we as a team hadn’t even thought of.

Current Projects

Currently I’m tinkering more & more with three.js, however, I want to tinker more with augmented reality applications. But first, I need to go & purchase at least 100 Udemy courses before I can say I’m well versed on the subject matter. 🙂

But I currently struggle to find time to tinker, since I’m a father of a toddler & I need to do a bunch of things around the house. That’s life I guess? 🤷‍♂️

Contact

If you wish to contact me, or read more about my work history, you can get in touch with me on LinkedIn. If you want, you could also check out what I’m up to on the likes of GitHub or Stackoverflow.