Engineering and educating for a free and open web.
University of Sheffield Computer Science graduate with a year of industry experience. Experienced with Ruby, React, and more.
Hi, I'm Simon.
I'm a software engineer with a year of industry experience and a Computer Science degree.
I'm motivated to:
- support free and open source software
- learn new things, and use those findings to teach and empower others
- make a positive difference to the world through technology
I'm determined to stick to these principles and use my power as a force for good.
Most of my experience lies with Ruby and React.JS, but I have supporting experience in Node.JS and Python. I'm a fast learner, so I'm equally ready to learn new tools.
Testimonials
Here's what folks I've worked with have to say.
Simon's enthusiasm towards helping out at the Code First: Girls community courses in Sheffield was so admirable. During the 2017/18 cycle, he helped teach over 50+ students the basics of web development and creating web apps using Python and Flask. His ability to communicate complex technical concepts to complete beginners is an important one to have in our increasingly multi-disciplinary world. Most notably, his contributions in helping students with GitHub and Bootstrap have been praised by the class and the wider CFG community.
Simon has been a key player in the success of the Code First: Girls community courses this year, his genuine passion to help both the local and global tech community mixed in with his impressive technical knowledge and skills has made it a pleasure to work with him. The future is very bright for him!
Simon is an extremely fast learner and a creative thinker, who has become a highly effective part of our dev team. As one example, he has gained very quickly a deep knowledge of Red Hat Single Sign-On, and his contributions to our work with it have been innovative and substantial. He’s able to respond constructively to feedback and to self-motivate, and he’s also integrated well socially with the wider group. His ability to make connections across teams, and to work well in a highly regulated engineering environment, mean that he will be missed when his year as an undergraduate developer with us comes to an end.
Simon has an ability to take a complex task (both IT-related and non-IT) and not only turn it around extremely quickly, but also to apply a level of thought and ingenuity of someone a number of years more experienced. It's this level of output and creativity which made the decision to bring Simon back after a few months in his summer holiday extremely easy.
Portfolio
Here are some examples of what I've been up to.
Key Projects
Raise.dev
Raise.dev Platform
Jun 30th, '20I am leading architecture and development of an online coaching platform at an early-stage startup.
UKCloud
Year in Industry
Jul 1st, '18I was part of a Scrum development team at a major UK cloud hosting provider, working across Ruby on Rails, Keycloak, and more.
Supporting Computer Science Higher Education
COM3550 Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme in Computer Science
Sep 14th, '19I worked in a local high school and sixth form to support and inspire computer science education as part of my degree.
Dissertation Project
Building a Platform for the Escape Game Community
Sep 15th, '19A social network to unify the escape room industry, based on industry research and requirements.
Code First Girls Sheffield
#shefcodefirst
Jan 29th, '20I volunteered as an assisting instructor to a class of female/BME first-time programmers.
The Odyssey
BrumHack 7.0
Nov 17th, '17A tool for players of Super Mario Odyssey, across Amazon Alexa, Discord, and the web.
University
Progressive Web App
COM3504 The Intelligent Web
Feb 9th, '20A Twitter-esque social network, including offline support via service worker and IndexedDB.
Snooze Clock
COM3505 Internet of Things
Sep 15th, '19An IoT alarm clock using microcontroller hardware that supports Amazon Alexa.
Information Retrieval System
Text Processing
Sep 15th, '19A system that applies stoplists, TF.IDF and cosine similarity to find documents relevant to a given query.
PID Controller for Navigation
Bio-Inspired Computing & Robotics
Feb 4th, '18A LEGO MindStorms program that guides a robot around a maze using its sensors.
Fives-and-Threes Dominoes
COM2001 Advanced Programming Topics
Sep 17th, '17A framework for the famous board game with intelligent players.
Personal
Personal Finance in Monzo
Personal Finance Application
Mar 18th, '19Finance forecasting app in Airtable backed by the Monzo API.
Come Together Generator
RightNow0verMe
Dec 6th, '19Twitter bot that generates random verses for the song 'Come Together'.
Tech Stack
Personal website
Apr 7th, '19I'm hosting this site on Netlify, but I've previously explored and hosted with Docker and Kubernetes.
Hackathons
ShefBall
HackTheBurgh 2018
Mar 9th, '18An in-browser online multiplayer dodgeball game.
HackSheffield 3.0
NotiFeed
Oct 13th, '17I led a team of first-time hackers using Express and Node.js.
mygit.club
Cal Hacks 4.0
Oct 5th, '17A meet-the-team page backed by GitHub's GraphQL API.
Ka-Bomb!
MLH Prime EU Regional
Mar 31st, '17A prototype online multiplayer Bomberman clone.
HackerTracker
HackNotts
Nov 25th, '16Aggregating data from GitHub, Twitter, and more to tell the story of a hackathon.
Game Master
GreatUniHack
Nov 11th, '16A text adventure game engine with live web statistics.
Blog
Here, I'll be writing about things I've done and learned.
Unsure about the world of remote work? Here's my early experience with it.
Let's dive into the history of my personal website. It's been quite the journey!
Want to get in touch?
If you're interested in working with me, I'd be happy to get in touch with you.