About
My programming journey
I first starting programming at school (JavaScript and GameMaker Language), but then took something of a hiatus as first I went through my maths degree (where I learnt a bit of MATLAB) and then I started learning to code again before I got my job at McMillan Williams. As I had got a job in accounting, I then started studying for the ACCA accounting qualification.
To make my job easier I had made a couple of Excel Macros. Then I transferred onto the project team for the new finance system of 3E.
As this was written in VB.Net this was familiar to me from working on Excel VBA and I switched to being half finance and half software developer. As the project ramped up, and I learnt to program in VB.Net (by learning C#) and SQL in most the 3E training sessions and in my own time, I was transferred full time onto the project team (fortunately a couple of weeks after I had enough accounting experience for the ACCA). (I had also learnt OQL, a bit like entity framework and written like SQL but in Visual Basic; and XSLT which is used in 3E’s templating system)
After a year or so as a developer, to round out my practical knowledge with some theory, I joined freeCodeCamp.org. There I learnt a lot of the theory behind a lot of what I was doing and was able to use a lot of this in practice. I had also joined the 3E-MatterSphere team, which used C# as its main programming language and showed a completely different style of programming and database management. 3E has a highly normalised database and a very structured way of doing things (and uses ASP.Net to build the front-end). 3E-MatterSphere has a much smaller database (100 or so tables rather than 3000+) and its frontend are forms as a Microsoft Office plugin. To extend 3E and 3E-MatterSphere’s reports, I built a lot of these in SSRS and 3E’s own reporting service.
Data Science was something that I found along my programming journey. I had been intending to pursue a master’s degree in computer science after completing the ACCA qualification but was introduced to the idea of Data Science instead. FreeCodeCamp had courses on Python and Data Science, so I went through those and started looking through the free section on DataCamp. I managed to get into City University’s Data Science course, where I have learnt a lot of theory behind Data Science and Machine Learning (and been reintroduced to MATLAB).
About me
In my spare time I enjoy building & painting Warhammer 40k miniatures, playing Blood Bowl (another Games Workshop game), Lego and model railways.