Hey, great to meet you. My name is Elliot, and I am a plant scientist, a communications manager and more latterly a programmer. I was raised in the mountains of northern Thailand and moved to the East Midlands of the UK nearly a decade ago to study plant science.
Since then, I have worked in a variety of organisations in several sectors, but in every area, I have worked I have seen the critical importance of good quality software to support people in their roles. This interest grew in me as over the last few years I have had the opportunity to work on various web development projects.
So, when the opportunity arose to take some time out and study on the coding pathway with IT Online Learning I jumped at it. So far it has been a challenging and rewarding experience.
My interest in programming started when I was a teenager at school, I was very blessed to have an excellent computer science teacher who valued experimenting and exploring as the main ways to teach. This method really connected with me and I marvelled at the simple Python programmes I was able to create to draw fun random patterns. I have remade a simple JavaScript version of one of my childhood favourites on the home page of this site.
After these classes my interest in programming never really went away, I would often tinker with little projects and take short coding courses online although I didn’t ever have much time to push this beyond the simplest level. During my time at university and in my following work life, I have been repeatedly struck by the importance of good quality digital tools to support people in their work.
I am interested in the ways that humans and computers interact and how we can improve that. For now, though I am just enjoying exploring this new digital world that is unfurling before me.
I have had numerous key influences over the past number of years, too many to mention here, but I think the most significant impact for me would be from my school computer science teacher.
His methods of teaching were very different from the rest of his colleagues, he used a very light touch and refused to answer any of our questions until we could prove we hadn’t been able to find an answer in the forums or documentation.
His favourite refrain was, what a great question I bet Google knows the answer. While this approach was deeply frustrating to a teenager struggling with their first bugs in their code, in hindsight practicing this approach to learning has benefited me greatly. This foundation in learning how to teach yourself programming has been invaluable to me and I greatly appreciate his influence.
During my course I have been involved in lots of different coding projects, some big ones and some smaller ones, some prescribed by the course and some personal projects. Some of these have been very engaging and interesting, and you can read more about them on the Projects section of the site.
However, the project I am most proud of must be the launching of a new website with the organisation that I work for. This website is very large with hundreds of active pages, thousands of accounts, a personalised commerce section as well as functionality for sharing user content, and it was a very large piece of work. I have learnt so much from being part of the team responsible for launching and maintaining this site, and during this time I have gotten to work closely with the development team and seen some of the challenges that they face especially when dealing with communication with clients and handling big projects on tight budgets.
While my role in this project didn’t require much coding, I have had to spend lots of time finding bugs and thinking creatively to develop solutions to problems our tight budget didn’t allow us to fix. It has been a great learning experience and despite some major challenges I am confident that I have been able to add a lot of value to my organisation through my work on this project.
The next step for me is to find somewhere where I can continue this programming journey, I would love to find a position from which I can keep growing and developing as a programmer, expanding my skill set and facing more real-world challenges. One day I would like to bring back my learnings to the charity sector, or back into the plant science world to continue to support and further develop the work that I have been involved with.