Speciality: Conversational interfaces / NLP

Why I chose it: It appeared to be the only area where my previous academic background (Law) was relevant, so they didn't consider me to have 7 years of blank on my CV.

I used to work for a consultancy that specialised in a very niche area (I won't say what – this is traceable enough already!). We charged our clients a very high hourly rate, because demand and supply. All the time I'd get calls like the following:
"Please could you just make this small change to the deployment?"
"Yes, of course. You don't have any contract hours left, so I'll just forward you to our billing department so you can sort out the payment first"
"Ah okay, please can you tell us how to do it"
[Even if I explained it, you wouldn't be able to do it – that's why you're coming to us.]
"...or better yet, just do it as a quick fix outside of work?"
[So... work for no pay? No thanks.]

While my company always had my back on these requests (obviously, they wanted payment too), they were so frequent that I got sick of it.

We have a notorious question in one of our coding interviews, designed to weed out people who've slapped 'Postgres' on their CV (because that's what we're looking for) when what they really mean is "I've used MySQL a lot, and it's basically the same, right?". People get choked on that about 70% of the time.

If you put something technical on your CV, be prepared to be tested on it in a coding interview!

In memory of the giant of engineering that was Larry Tesler, today I will be coding solely by copying and pasting. Thanks for making my life so easy, Larry. RIP.

GitHub is down. Unlucky client, guess I have a *really* good excuse not to push that scope-creeped heap of a new frontend. Because apparently 'those "small changes" you've made to the Sketch file are in fact entirely new uses of the data structures' wasn't good enough.

At a Magic: the Gathering prerelease tournament (yeah, yeah, stereotypes), on my phone, with a pen and paper copy of the SQL query, as the phone screen was too small to read it properly in full. Managed to fix the bug in the query about 30 seconds before the next game started.

The debugging went well, but the tournament did not; I think I was a bit distracted!!

I finished a 30-minute lecture today with the conclusion "so it turns out that throwing way more data and resources at this Machine Learning problem gives much better results."

Who could have possibly predicted that?!

I was deploying a fix for a bug (for a hotly-anticipated feature) with a really strict time limit (there was literally a countdown clock). Our senior dev couldn't do it, and threw it out for the masses. I fixed it with about 1m30s left on the clock.

That felt pretty great.

Sometimes, just sometimes, GitHub has its heroes. Probably saved me over an hour of my life. Thank you kind stranger!!

My favourite year was probably 2016, when I left my previous job and became a full-time dev. That year, the OS project I'd been working on hit 10 000 users, and one of the collaborators decided to hire me.

Moved country, and had a really exciting time, and the years since have been pretty great too.