Journey

Backend Developer — Freelance

These days I build the half of a mobile app you never see — the part that quietly keeps everything, checks it is right, and hands it back the moment someone taps a button. I set up the machines it lives on too, so getting it running and keeping it running is mine as well, not somebody else's problem.

• Built the app's behind-the-scenes half in Express.js and TypeScript
• Wrote the rules deciding what gets accepted and what gets turned away
• Worked out how the information is organised, for features still being invented
• Set up and now run the servers and file storage on AWS (EC2, RDS and S3)
• Agreed exactly what each side would send the other before either was built

Full-stack Developer — Part-time

Half of this job was keeping the lights on — looking after the accounts and machines that kept everything online and paid for. The other half was the fun part: building a shop checkout system from nothing, both halves of it, to see whether I could carry the whole thing on my own.

• Ran the cloud accounts and billing across DigitalOcean, Cloudflare and Hostinger
• Built the behind-the-scenes half of a checkout system, talking to an outside service
• Built its screens as well, and worked out how the information should be organised
• Moved files off old servers onto new ones without losing a single thing

Backend Developer — Laravel

A few months into my first job I asked to move off the screens team and onto the one working behind the scenes, and they said yes. It meant learning a language I had never written a single line of — I leaned hard on what I already knew, and was building real features with it inside a month. Same company, no gap: eight months there in total.

• Moved across from the screens team by choice, same company
• Built the behind-the-scenes half of several live web apps in Laravel
• Added whole new sections to apps that were already up and running
• Made slow pages quicker by fixing how they went looking for information
• Learned Laravel from zero PHP, on the strength of Java and Spring Boot

Frontend Developer — Vue 3 / Nuxt 3

My first proper developer job, and the start of eight straight months at that company — it carried on into the backend role above from August. I built the screens people actually looked at: dashboards, charts, the pages where you manage who is allowed to do what. I learned it inside a live product with real users on it, which is terrifying and far and away the fastest way to learn anything.

• Built a subscription platform's screens in Nuxt 3, from pieces I could reuse
• Built a second Nuxt 3 product that shared its information with the first
• Kept an older Vue 2 system running and added to it
• Connected the screens to the information behind them, and made it work on a phone

Data Encoder

A data-encoding job — typing information into systems, all day, every day. It was not the work I wanted, but it paid for the courses that eventually got me out of it. Doing something that repetitive for months while studying at night taught me more about discipline than any course ever did.