Building systems by following curiosity

My journey into software development started somewhere unexpected: a busy estate agency in Hammersmith, West London.

One afternoon, the client system we used (Dezrez) kept throwing an error whenever I tried to save anything. Rather than give up, I went home, Googled the error, and down the rabbit hole I went. That search led me to a YouTube ad for a Java course on Udemy... and the rest is history (well, still in progress).

I enrolled at Kingston College to study Access to Computing, where I got my first real taste of programming with VB.NET, databases, early web development, and algorithms.

From there, I went on to the University of Kent, where things really clicked: Java, Go, Erlang, concurrency, APIs, distributed systems, even early ML concepts. It was the first time I felt like I could see the entire landscape: not just how things work, but why they work.

A year at Eli Lilly gave me my first hands-on exposure to the world of cloud infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and the reality of working in a large organisation.

That was followed by a role in software development where I built front-end apps in Vue and React, APIs in Express, and even implemented OIDC single sign-on using Passport.js.

At Profile Pensions, I plunged straight into a microservices world: GraphQL services, Express APIs, Firestore, Mongo with Mongoose hooks, and an increasing number of asynchronous patterns using GCP Pub/Sub and RabbitMQ. I even found myself diving into Helm charts and Terraform whenever a deployment or config chose chaos.

Over time I shifted heavily into the front end, working closely with brand and UI/UX to turn Figma designs into pixel-perfect React apps. That period taught me a lot: attention to detail, the importance of visual polish, and the fact that designers can somehow spot a 1px misalignment from across the room.

The start-up environment gave me autonomy and room to grow; I led projects, experimented with new tech, and worked across the business to help ship key products. I also collaborated closely with DevOps, helping introduce ArgoCD for clearer deployment visibility and learning my way around Kubernetes by debugging whatever strange issue popped up that week.

Today at Moneyfarm, I work as a backend engineer in a larger multi-squad environment where every workflow interacts with something downstream. I build pension and investment features in Scala and TypeScript, and work with versioned and public APIs where decisions have real business impact.

There is a different flavour of complexity here: Kafka-driven events, system boundaries, cross-team ownership, and conversations with software architects that force better reasoning about design and long-term evolution. I am also continually making peace with functional Scala: Cats, type gymnastics, syntactic magic, and the rest. It has been an ongoing exercise in thinking more rigorously, writing more intentionally, and engineering with more awareness.

Looking back, I started out trying to fix one broken form and ended up building systems designed to handle thousands of them. I still haven’t solved that Dezrez error, but maybe that’s what keeps the story going.