Since many of you will have no idea who I am, it makes sense to start at the beginning.

I was born in 1993 in the south of England to parents with backgrounds in Physics and Civil Engineering. As such, I was brought up with a curiosity for the world and how it works. However, unlike many in my field, I wasn’t really interested in technology until 2010 when I started sixth-form college. At this time, I was more interested in music, art and animation. Fortunately, my college offered a computing A-level course and I thought at the time that this might be useful to supplement my application to animation degree courses.

However, after learning the basics of Pascal (A bizarre choice of teaching language for the time), I rapidly developed an obsession with programming and discovered that I could also release my creativity by writing code and solving problems. A course-mate and I started writing simple websites using PHP for family, friends and any small businesses that were willing to speak to us and I started to consider university applications to Computer Science courses instead.

In 2013, I moved to Wales and started my Computer Science course at Cardiff University. Now surrounded and influenced by fellow tech-nerds, I started following the latest tech and buying the shiniest gadgets with what little money I could spare from my student loan instalments. Some of my early fascinations started by tinkering with devices like the NFC ring and the Pebble smartwatch.

On my course, I mostly used Java and Python in applications like computer vision, game design and machine learning. In my final year, I developed an interest in quantum computing after discussing the topic with my personal tutor whose main research area was quantum control. As a result, my final year project was a program written in C++ and CUDA that calculated a matrix exponential (A useful function in quantum control) using the Padé approximation. The idea was to speed up the calculation vs a traditional CPU based implementation by using dedicated hardware (NVIDIA GPUs) and parallel processing. This project can be found on my GitHub.

Outside of my studies, I was one of the founding members of Cardiff University Archery Club. In my 2nd and 3rd year, I was elected Club President and I helped to grow the club from a handful of members to a “Gold Tier” club with over 200 members and multiple wins at competitions. I shot in a number of regional and national competitions myself and am particularly proud of my 2 varsity medals won against our rivals in Swansea (pictured).

I even found a way to combine archery with my course work by developing a computer vision system that could analyse a photo of an archery target and calculate the scores of the arrows that landed on it.

After leaving university, I joined the newly formed R&D team at Equiniti, a FTSE 100 financial services company in the UK and reported directly to the company’s Chief Strategist. My initial role was to investigate the threats and opportunities offered by blockchain technology. Most of this work focussed on private blockchains built on frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric rather than public blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Fabric is written in Golang and this was my first exposure to the language. Little did I know at the time, but this would quickly become my go-to language (pun intended).

In 2018, the department was expanded and I had the opportunity to run my own team of graduates. Throughout my time at the company we used a wide variety of technologies including blockchain, machine-learning, GANs and more to investigate topics like electronic voting, fraud and the disintermediation of paper share trading certificates.

In 2019, I also started a part-time, sponsored PhD. My research topic was electronic voting - more specifically, whether or not blockchains could help to solve the incompatibilities between coercion resistance, verifiability and privacy.

At the time, I thought the similarities between my research and my role in R&D made managing the PhD easier. But in reality, I found the stress and workload of running a team full-time in parallel with a part-time PhD to be too much and I left my PhD after 18 months. At the time, this felt like a massive failure, but with hindsight and kind words from my wife and family, I realised that this was the only reasonable decision and am very thankful that I left when I did.

In early 2021, there were significant changes to the executive team at Equiniti and they decided to sell off or remove significant parts of the company. Unfortunately for me, this led to the redundancy of my role. At the time, this came as a bit of a shock. My manager at the time was incredibly supportive and I had always felt relatively secure over the 4 and half years I had spent there, even amidst a global pandemic and the transition from office to work-from-home.

Thanks to a recommendation from a friend, I was quickly able to find myself a new job at Yoello, a Cardiff-based startup whose order and pay app had grown rapidly in a post-pandemic world. This was my first “backend” role and I worked mostly with serverless Python and Terraform.

The differences between my previous job and Yoello were vast. At Equiniti, most of our projects would never reach production and we had lots of time to experiment with different tools and technologies. In such a massive company with over 100 years of history, things move slowly through narrow pipelines wrapped in red tape. At Yoello, a young start-up, the pace was rapid, the process was non-existent and the stakes of getting it wrong were much higher.

My time at Yoello was far from perfect and I did not always agree with how things were run. However, I will always be hugely grateful to those who gave me a job in a time of need. Some of the people who I worked with are now my closest friends and it’s safe to say that I learnt a lot about how to work in a fast moving start-up - and a lot about how not to work too.

One thing I will never forget from my time at Yoello is going for team drinks in a bar that used our order and pay app. While chatting with some of my colleagues, one of the staff members walked past and saw us wearing our company branded hoodies. They immediately asked if we worked for the company and upon confirmation proceeded to tell us how thankful they were to us for creating the product and giving them support when Covid restrictions had hit them. They insisted that their business would not have survived otherwise. This was the first time I had seen with my own eyes that the code I had written had made a real-world difference to a person’s business and all of their employees. It really made me re-evaluate what I was looking for from a career in software engineering.

I always knew that my stint at Yoello wasn’t going to be permanent. Python as a language has its place, but I wasn’t the biggest fan of using it on the backend and my language of choice at the time was Golang. I wanted a role that would combine the best bits of my previous jobs. Something technical and innovative, but that moves at pace and can have a positive impact on the world.

Enter OneID, a digital identity start-up whose mission is to “Make the world a safer place”. I knew very quickly that I was going to be happy here. The engineering team is small, but extremely knowledgable and the managers trust and lean on the developers in the right way. They understand the importance of managing technical debt and listen to the input given by the development team.

The company and product have a strong social purpose and there is a genuine effort made to fulfill it. It is also a certified B-Corp which means that its social and environmental impacts are held to account and its customers and employees are treated fairly.

In my day-to-day, I work with Golang, Connect RPC and Kubernetes to build and maintain their backend systems and APIs. I have become a huge proponent of clean code and reducing technical debt and I am proud of the impact I’ve been able to have on the project in my time here.

In July 2022, I opened my first PR to go-task/task to fix an issue that I personally came across in my use of the project at work. This was followed by several more PRs that added major features like aliases and internal tasks. By December of the same year, I was a regularly working on features/bug fixes and responding to questions and became an official project maintainer.

I occasionally write blog posts on Task’s website and in fact, this is what made me want to start a more personal blog. Anytime I post something on the Task blog, I will also link to it from my personal one.

Outside of my work, I have a few hobbies. As I alluded to earlier, I was into music when growing up and play guitar to a reasonable standard - though nowhere near as often these days. I also have a background in music technology i.e. recording and mixing music which I also studied while in college.

I mentioned doing archery at university, but I have actually been shooting in various forms (recurve, compound, longbow) since 2006 (age 12). I took a break for a couple of years after university, but have recently been getting back into it. This time, preferring a traditional horse bow over all the fancy modern stuff. It’s a nice way to get away from the technology and revert to a centuries-old sport using nothing but sticks and string.

I love to travel and do so whenever time and cost permits. Some of my recent trips include India, Morocco, Greece and Lithuania. I definitely plan to post about these trips in the future including an upcoming trip to Japan!

My wife, Eve (pictured with me in the Agafay Desert, Morocco), works in Graphic Design and we now live in a flat in Cardiff Bay with our two cats, Spyro and Luna (also pictured).

I’ve always felt like writing about yourself is one of the hardest things to do. This felt like writing my university personal statement all over again 😱 When I do finally get around to posting again, don’t expect this kind of content! It’ll likely be a rant or about something new I’ve learnt or tried. You also shouldn’t expect posts with any kind of regularity. Maybe I’ll write nothing for months and then post twice in the same week. Who knows!