Following an education in music and maths with statistics, I began my career in the luxury hospitality industry before retraining as a coder at the prestigious Makers Academy in London, where I went on to assist other students as an alumni helper. Now a fully qualified full-stack developer, working for a successful sports finance startup, with three years experience in using Ruby on Rails, Javascript with Backbone and ES6, and PostgreSQL.
Tifosy, London, UK (11/15 to present)
Junior Web Developer
- Junior web developer at a startup company delivering reward based campaigns and investment raises for sports clubs
- Full stack role, working with Ruby on Rails, BackboneJS, ES6, jQuery, Scss, PostgreSQL, Rspec, Capybara, CircleCI and Heroku
- Following best practices: TDD, Git, CI, linting (rubocop, jslint), Google Page Speed Insights
- Working closely with the CTO or independently on maintaining the website, improving design and performance, fixing bugs and building new features
- Built major features including an admin interface, payment forms, investor certification and certificates
- Platform has generated close to £10m in investments and crowdfunding using features I have built during my employment
Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, London, UK (10/13 to 04/15)
Cocktail Bartender
- Fast paced cocktail environment in one of London's top 5 star hotels
- Working to strict standards and deadlines. No matter how busy the evening, all drinks must be served within five minutes to impeccable standards
- Created popular cocktails and helped design the cocktail menu
- Established recipes and provided cocktail training for all staff, so the entire team followed a consistent high standard
- Responsible for ordering new stock cost effectively
- Improving my knowledge of BackboneJS by creating a simple two player interface for Scrabble
- Second attempt after previous version using Angular (https://github.com/dwatson62/scrabble-backbone) shortly after graduating Makers Academy.
Backchat (https://github.com/dwatson62/backchat)
- Simple messaging app using Backbone and realtime notifications with Pusher.
Daryl's Palace (https://github.com/dwatson62/daryls_palace)
- Solo project created after Makers Academy to create casino games using the MEAN stack.
Guess Who (https://github.com/dwatson62/Guess-Who)
- Solo project created midway through Makers Academy to practice Sinatra, Ruby and PostgreSQL.
I relish the opportunity to learn and try new things, not just in programming but in all aspects of life. Aside from my current work requirements, when I have time to spare I have experimented with numerous different technologies, including Python, Haskell, React, Angular and Ionic. My ideal position would involve regularly experimenting with new languages and frameworks, as I believe a more diverse knowledge base makes for a more efficient problem solver. In addition, the best way I find to learn is by creating new projects with a technology. For example in my casino project above, I needed to learn how to create my own RESTful API using MongoDB to provide data about the players in the game, such as their name and current balance, and how to utilise this so the game can automatically update a player's balance after each round of betting.
I enjoy solving problems and have developed a slight addiction to CodeWars with more than 850 points. Creating my scrabble project above I found to be a highly enjoyable problem to solve (having made two different solutions). The main challenge in building scrabble is in knowing which letters and tiles are in play, and being able to calculate the correct ones in the correct order, sometimes with multiple words being played in multiple directions. I found the best way to solve this was by using a lot of recursion.
I have experience of morning stand-ups and communicating clearly what I am working on each day, even to non-tech colleagues, and slack is an important part of our company workflow. In my previous career as a hotel bartender, my role demanded excellent levels of communication between colleagues. Passing on correct and specific information quickly, such as customer allergies, preferences and payment, was essential to the business and for providing a five star service. No matter how hectic or busy service was, correct and precise communication was vital.
Makers Academy is a highly selective coding bootcamp that accepts only the top ten percent of applicants. For 12 weeks, the course focuses heavily on programming practices such as TDD, pair-programming and problem solving, whilst teaching a variety of technologies. This experience has nurtured my passion for code and taught me about best practices in software craftsmanship, and to take pride in well-designed code. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Makers, and have learnt so much. After finishing my course, I stayed on an extra six weeks as an alumni helper, to improve my own understanding and to be the first point of contact to new students when they needed help.
- A Level Maths with Statistics (C)
- A Level Music (C)
- A Level English Literature (D)
- AS Level Computing (B)
I studied AS Level Computing for one year, with the language taught being Visual Basic. The coding side of the course I greatly enjoyed and I received 86/90 for my final project. However, the theory side did not interest me at that point in my life, so I concentrated on other subjects for the second year.
- 7 GCSEs, including ICT (A), Maths (B) and English Language (B)
- Two years travelling and working in a variety of roles across Australia and New Zealand
- Learnt to be adaptable to different cities and countries. I needed to be a go-getter, arriving in a new city every few months with little money and knowing nobody, to quickly find work and a social circle.
- Communication skills were important and I learnt to meet and work with a variety of people from across the world.
- Also spent five months traveling throughout southeast Asia and am well-travelled across Europe