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Personal

I was made redundant.

It came as a shock. Luckily my husband was sitting next to me when I received the email confirming it so I had a hug straight away and his reassuring, positive reaction which helped. I felt so many different emotions. Immediately I felt surprise and also embarrassment. Embarrassed that I had been singled out. There […]

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New Engineer Scala

My Scala 3 course for beginners is out 🎉

I’m really excited to announce that my Scala 3 beginners course is out on the LinkedIn platform now! https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-scala-14639381/ This course is for people with only basic programming experience. No Java experience is required! It’s a really gentle introduction for those who are interested in learning more about this amazing language. I wanted to create […]

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New Engineer Scala

What is Scala?

A couple of years ago I had never heard of the programming language Scala. Now I write it everyday! This article is for those who don’t know what Scala is and would like a quick overview. Scala is a relatively new computer programming language. It was first released in 2003 and publicly released in 2004. […]

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Tech conference

Creating my dream tech conference

About 3 months ago I was feeling really frustrated. Yet another Scala conference had taken place and I couldn’t even understand the talk titles on the conference schedule, let alone the talks themselves. I thought to myself: If only there was a Scala conference for beginners. A place where I could feel the excitement of […]

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New Engineer

Failing as a junior developer

I’ve been a software engineer for the last 15 months. I’ve been failing a lot recently Sometimes failing quietly and sometimes failing in very public ways at work. I recently had my first incident retro where my actions caused the incident (an incident retro is where you get together with your colleagues and understand why something […]

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New Engineer

My experience on the Guardian’s Digital Fellowship

A number of software engineers have reached out to me who are interested in joining the Guardian. I thought it might be helpful to write my answers down so that everyone who is interested can benefit from them. What is the digital fellowship? The Guardian’s digital fellowship is an annual programme open to people early in their software […]

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New Engineer

Diary of a Self-Taught Engineer

After about 9 months teaching myself how to code, I have accepted an offer with the Guardian Newspaper to join their Digital Fellowship programme as an Associate Software Engineer. In this article, I want to support readers who are already teaching themselves how to code or are considering it. For others, I hope this article sheds some […]

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New Engineer

Beware of burnout whilst teaching yourself how to code

Yesterday I had my first very public break-down during a coding workshop. In this article I want to discuss why I broke down and what you and I dear reader can both learn from this. As a background, 6 months ago I started teaching myself how to code and yesterday, experienced my first break down […]

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New Engineer Tech conference

My first tech conference

I want to tell you about my first ever developer conference, which was View Source by Mozilla. This took place at the RSA in London. The conference is primarily for designers and developers and the content largely concerns the web (rather than mobile apps for example). I was lucky enough to get a complimentary diversity ticket […]