On the 30 January I was delivered the devastating news by the CEO Kristan that he was putting all the staff of HNR on 30 days notice. I always knew this was the risk with a pre-revenue start up but still a worrying time facing unemployment for the first time in my life.

All that said I am excited to take the huge onboarding of skills I gained at HNR into my next role and I cannot wait to update this record with who that will be!

My time at Bowler Eggs came to an end and what a journey that was. Arrived with zero experience in Angular and MongoDB but through hard work of learning these skills I managed to deliver a great new application to see the company right for the next 20 years.

I left Bowler Eggs excited to started my next career progress with Humans Not Robots as I knew the experience I was about receive was going to be a game changer for me.

18 months after starting my role with Bowler Eggs I have completed an apprenticeship, done so many training courses, grown my social networks in this sector and I will leave Bowler Eggs just as I intended. Confident that I will succeed in my next role building on some solid foundations I grew in my time their and excited to continue learning and developing me.

It truly blows my mind when I look back at what I have done/achieved over the past 2 years and hopefully I have evidenced this well here in my portfolio.

PurpleBeard who I did my bootcamp with contacted me and asked if I would like to teach the next cohort. I jumped at the opportunity even though I new this was adding a lot to an already heavily loaded plate. But I new this would help me as much as I could help the students I would teach.

I complete rebuilt the course for PurpleBeard which saw them successfully continue to deliver the course which I was part of for the next 4 cohorts. It was a lovely experience helping people change their lives and helping them to secure employment in the sectore they had been learning in.

Left the NHS after 15 years of service, pretty scaring time leave the safety of an environment where I was well established. At the same time so excited to start this adventure which I new was going to be tough but I new my years of experience and grit would see me right.

Completed my bootcamp and started to focus my attention on leaving the NHS to gain a work placement that would enable me to grow my skills.

After many applications and interviews I managed to secure 2 job offers and I decided to take the one offered by Bowler Eggs. Even though I would be developer on my own I new the full end to end experience of a full stack develop would see my learnings accelerated.

As my confidence grew, I started to refine the number of avenues I was following to learn:

• www.w3schools.com
• www.traversymedia.com
• www.developedbyed.com
• www.webdevsimplified.com
• www.learntocodewith.me     (Listen to the Podcast).

It became apparent quickly to enable me to apply for jobs I needed to do the following:

1. Buy my own computer.
2. Refactor my Curriculum Vitae.
3. Update my LinkedIn Page.
4. Start using GITHub and create a portfolio landing page.
5. Create a portfolio website.
6. Complete Projects.
7. Complete Coding Challenges

I did loads of research into the correct laptop to get (DELL XPS 13) which I have set up now and ready to assist me in any task I want to undertake.

Next, I moved onto my Curriculum Vitae, I researched load, took it from 2 pages to 1 and refined it to showcase my skills/recent experience. About 2 weeks on and off to complete this while I received feedback and help from so many people which was great learning experience in itself. At the same time I updated my LinkedIn page to keep it in line with my Curriculum Vitae.

Then after attending an event with treehouse (https://hopin.com/events/hour-with-a-tech-recruiter) I started to create my portfolio page in GITHub and created a YouTube channel that I intend to use in the future to highlight issues I have overcome with dyslexia.

This brings me up to date of writing this blog 18th February 2021 and creating my portfolio website, I took this week off work to complete this and it is a good job to as it is taking me all this time. Yes that is slow but I know in 12 month’s time all these tasks are going to be so much more natural to me I am enjoying the discomfort.

The portfolio has been the best part of the journey so far from learning how to buy a domain and then hosting it via GITHub pages and the challenges of learning about DNS. Now I am constructing the site and I decided to use a boiler plate from HTML5UP which was a good idea I feel but comes with its own opportunities to learn.

Now I have the portfolio in place the next tasks for March are:

• Apply for jobs.
• Complete the frontend certification with w3schools.
• Complete JavaScript certification with simplilearn.
• Complete Projects to showcase in my portfolio.
• Complete coding challenges to go in my portfolio.

I started researching how to learn what I needed to progress, spoke to colleagues, fired a load of emails off to people I did not even know and spoke to friends for advice on what to do.

I quickly realised I was drowning with all the information out there and how many institutes are offering free advice then leading to paid courses. As a dyslexic person I knew learning from a book was not possible so I was looking for video based teaching but this often had little structure if you go down the free route i.e. which language to learn first. From this I knew I needed some structure which led me to ‘Bootcamps’ and like buses 2 came along at once pretty much for free.

• www.purplebeard.co.uk
• www.teamtreehouse.com

My learning journey began and not to do things by halves I did 2 bootcamps at once. These were both front end bootcamps learning HTML, CCS, JavaScript, responsive web design, Bootstrap and React.js.

Around this time I managed to find 2 mentors that I now communicate with regularly, I joined 4 networking groups on Slack that I communicate daily with and I attend meetups regularly. I feel all of these are key to start to feel more comfortable in the Tech environment and having the confidence to move forward.

Towards the end of the month as I started to get more comfortable with the studying I realised my current role is hindering me to sharpen and use these new skills, the decision was made to find new employment.

Rented my home to live with my parents while they went through cancer treatment so I could support them and stop the pandemic come in the way of me helping them.

Panic set in when I discovered this report:

I realised that I did not understand what was being described passed HTML and CSS. Probably the best thing that could have happened to me as it gave me the necessary kick in the butt to start this journey I am on now. So rather than spending my time looking for somewhere to live after the treatment I decided to focus completely on my studies and keep myself flexible to move anywhere to work.

I left the accounting behind and took a role within the commissioning arm of the NHS as full-stack developer. This was great I learnt a lot and develop strong skills in SQL, Visual Studio Suite, HTML and CSS. I led on some huge projects and learn some core base methodologies for programming.

This was primarily taken up as an accountant for NHS. I struggled with this career right up to becoming a costing accountant because management accounts is completely based on experience and chopping the values up in the ledge with arbitrary concepts.

Becoming a ‘costing accountant’ was the best thing for me and the best time in my life so far. This is complete centre around taking a cost and attributing this to the actual driver of the cost. This is a new methodology in finance and found me working closing with doctors all over the hospital to establish these drivers to improve the accuracy.

The other aspect that I loved about this role was we needed to use technology to display the data to the stakeholders, I ended up building UI’s in Qlikview. This highlighted to me that I enjoyed the UI building process, the ability to create something that did not exist before. Then by chance I attend an event called ‘Leeds digital festival’ (https://leedsdigitalfestival.org/) this was a 2 week event of lots of little workshops all over Leeds where my eyes were opened to Tech and I thought “I want this in my life”.