Profile
I’m a recent graduate from General Assembly’s Web Development Immersive course.
Previously I had a successful career as a Senior TV Producer, working at many of the top London agencies. This has given me a great background in organising and managing processes and teams of people, whilst also nurturing creativity. Whilst this was really enjoyable I came to realise it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to find my passion and after much thought and investigation, I found the world of coding.
I’ve always been interested in technology as a whole, the tech behind film and special effects was my main interest and the bit of my job I really loved above all others. Marrying that with the very logical side to my personality (which led me to be a producer in the first place) and my love of logic-based puzzles and challenges led me to coding as an opportunity to apply that, along with the creativity that I also enjoyed in TV Production on a daily basis.
Obviously, I’ve only just scratched the surface of development and I’m looking to find a team in which I can really grow as a developer. There is so much out there that I would love to learn and expand on the great foundation I have built here at GA.
Dev Skills
Front End: HTML5, CSS3, SCSS, Bootstrap, Bulma, Slick & Materialize
JavaScript: ES6, React, Express.js, Node.js, AngularJS, JSON, jQuery, AJAX
Package Managers/Compilers: Yarn, Webpack, npm, Bower
Databases: PostgreSQL, Mongo, MySQL
Organisation/Deployment: Git, Github, Heroku, Trello
Ruby: Ruby, Ruby on Rails
Design: Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Balsamiq
Methodologies/Practices: Agile methodologies, RESTful web services, CRUD methods, MVC framework, pair programming, TDD, mobile-first design principles, responsive web design, presenting code/projects
Other Skills
Over 15 years of working my way up through the Advertising TV Production world I’ve developed a wide range of transferable skills. From building a tower of vehicles on a runway in South Africa to organising a car chase through the streets of Vancouver via a family of alien puppets and celebrities like Idris Elba and Bill Nighy, every production has taught me something new.
Video Editing: On programs such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid & Final Cut and also simple animation and the like using Adobe After Effects.
Organisation: As a TV Producer, I was in charge of scheduling, budgeting and managing the delivery of multi-million pound TV Commercials filmed all over the world.
Teamwork: Again whilst working as a TV Producer I worked alongside creatives and account teams, quite often as the middleman between the two who often had differing views on what they wanted out of a project and how to achieve it!
Presentations: Also as part of my role, I would lead organisational and planning meetings as well as presentations of work in progress with senior partners and clients.
Work
iWish
Tech: MongoDB, Express.js, React, Node.js, AWS file upload, Axios, Bcrypt, Bootstrap, Lodash, Nodemailer, Mailgun, Bluebird, Mocha, Chai.
Project 4 was our final project in which we were tasked with building a full MERN stack application having spent the last 2 weeks learning React. As it was also in the lead up to Christmas I chose to create a wishlist app enabling users to create a wishlist and share it with their friends and family.
On top of the basic MERN stack setup, I added a few additional features such as oAuth for Facebook and Nodemailer combined with Mailgun to send emails to people who weren’t registered to get them to sign up when added to a list.
View the ReadMe on Github
Happy Cabby
Tech: MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, Node.js, Mocha, Chai, Bluebird, JWT tokens, Bulma, Bcrypt.
Working in a team we produced a full MEAN stack application using JWT tokens for authentications, Express.js for the backend and Angular on the frontend. We also used several third-party APIs including Google Maps and their Geocode feature and Eventful’s API.
Happy Cabby is an application designed to show taxi drivers what events are happening around them and how busy those events are so that they can determine where might be a good spot to head for to pick up a fare.
View the ReadMe on Github
Eat Better Pizza
Tech: MongoDB, Express.js, EJS Layouts, Bluebird, Bcrypt.
For our second project, we were tasked to build a full-stack RESTful application that included authentication using Express.js, EJS Layouts, SASS, BCrypt & a Mongo database.
Eat Better Pizza is a full-stack RESTful app allowing users to sign up, create reviews of restaurants and comment on existing ones, all to make sure they are eating the best pizza possible!
View the ReadMe on Github
Simon The Synth
Tech: HTML, CSS & JavaScript/jQuery.
For our first project on the course, we had to build a game using HTML, CSS & JavaScript/jQuery.
For my game, I decided to create a SIMON game based on a retro synth pad.
View the ReadMe on Github