I never thought I'd be a developer. If you asked me or my friends and family what I wanted to be growing up, you'd hear "Doctor" before you'd even finished asking. Looking back, the hints were all there — messing around with HTML at 13, building the kind of website that should come with a seizure warning: autoplaying MIDI files, a marquee tag doing way too much work, animated GIFs everywhere, maybe a hit counter for good measure. Then a week of work experience at Rare when I was 15 — which on paper is the dream at that age, getting paid to play video games all day. Except I kept wandering off to bother the dev team instead, and had more fun there than with the actual testers. Even then, I think I knew. But the big bang was AS level computing, and a teacher, Mr White, who taught it so well he changed my whole trajectory — I dropped my plans to study medicine, ditched chemistry, and never looked back.
These days I'm a lead developer at FIS, working mostly in C# and Python. I mentor where I can, set technical direction where I'm needed, and still spend as much time as possible actually in the code. AI is the latest thing pulling my attention — equal parts excited and nosy about where it's all going.
Outside of work, I'm usually building something:
Tools I reach for most:
Say hi if any of this overlaps with what you're building — I'm always happy to talk shop.