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Recently decided to try programming – I do wish I’d done it sooner, but still feel my past experience has been extremely valuable. I’ve learned a lot, whether it be the soft skills, or things like resilience, patience, adaptability and effective teamworking. Buzzwords aside, I’m a better person for it.

I’m enjoying applying my love of problem solving in such a rewarding, creative and mentally stimulating way. It leaves me feeling energised and fulfilled when the day ends. Teaching allowed me to achieve some long-term goals (camper van trips and moving to Taiwan) whilst doing a job I enjoyed, but coding is what really interests and motivates me - it was a big decision to move away from teaching, especially midway through my PGCE, but I have no regrets.

Most recently a teacher and before that worked in sales, recruitment and admin for a short while. Now pursuing a longstanding interest in tech and launch my career within this sector.

I recently completed the Northcoders Software Development bootcamp - a highly rated and comprehensive introduction to coding, with a focus on collaborative approaches, paired programming and group projects.

Starting with fundamental principles (TDD, HOFs, closure, recursion etc.) we moved on to back-end, building a server from scratch along with API endpoints in a week-long solo project. Then, on to front-end using React, with another week’s solo project, corresponding with the back-end project. Finally, there was a 3 week, 6-person group project – a mobile map app utilising React Native, PSQL/Express and Google maps APIs.