Story

My journey started on my family computer when I was 8 (yep!) years old.

One day I found myself in a rabbit hole of creating websites that became fansites and digital journals on Piczo, Freewebs, and Xanga. This is also how I started writing online.

Despite this interest, I dropped Computer Science as a subject to study after feeling like an outsider in my GCSE Computing class and opted for a career in healthcare.

After missing out on medical school, I enrolled in a three-year Biomedical Sciences course at The University of Sheffield, intending to pursue a postgraduate in Medicine.

I quickly realised that I actually didn't want to work in the field at all. So, I fell back to my passions: writing online and building new themes for several websites.

When a project came up partnered with a local agency, I used the opportunity to do something different. #GivaLiva was a campaign that encouraged organ donation, made up of a simple carousel website with my hand-drawn sketches along with a very detailed social media campaign.

This caught the agency's attention, and I was offered my first internship as a Software Engineer.

I found out Code First Girls' coding courses were running at my university, so I signed up curious about what we would build in this group setting.

I enjoyed it so much that I ended up becoming a course instructor teaching two six hour weekly classes every for three years. Without realising it at first, I ended up building a local community around the courses that became known as #shefcodefirst.

Outside the course, we travelled around the UK to tech conferences to learn about the industry together.

Eager to experience what life was like outside being a university student, I took a year out of university and worked as a Communications and External Engagement Intern at the University of Sheffield.

Alongside my placement year, I spent my spare time teaching students how to code with Code First Girls, exploring opportunities in the tech space and attending and organising hackathons.

When I returned to my studies, I had more clarity on the direction of my career. My obsession for the next couple of months was to double down on everything and anything that could get me into the tech industry.

As I wrote my dissertation on cancer cells, I worked several jobs: remotely as a web developer, supporting students with their entrepreneurial ideas at the university start-up facility (USE) and was a student vlogger highlighting tech initiatives running at the university.

I also grew the #shefcodefirst community, attended and spoke at tech events and grew my online presence.

After graduating, I joined BT's Digital Engineering graduate program, where I spent two years learning as much as possible. I joined four teams for six months each: architecture, software engineering, platform engineering, and site reliability engineering (SRE).

Outside the day-to-day, I was active in several initiatives in the company and continued to get involved in the UK tech scene while documenting my learnings on my blog.

At the end of the program, I joined a newly formed SRE team where I introduced SRE principles from Google into the organisation. We later spoke about it at SRECON20.

Later, I moved to Flutter (Sky Bet) doing similar Platform Engineering work with a focus on cloud native technologies.

Whilst I enjoyed engineering, I wanted to consolidate all my interests in latest tech, community building and education.

When I asked the tech community what this was, they pointed me to developer relations and the people leading developer communities.

In July 2021, I pivoted to my dream role of building communities and creating content full-time at Gitpod.

I also created technical content that have been watched and read by thousands of developers worldwide. I closed my chapter at Gitpod in May 2024.

I joined Vercel in June 2024, and currently building the Vercel Community.

Want to collaborate? Send me an email.