So… my last post was a good 2 years ago now…. Hi how have you been?
It’s been a very busy couple of years with a lot of stuff shifting in my personal life meaning things inevitably take a back seat. However its been long enough that I needed to give myself a new start and see about blogging again and getting back into speaking again.
Still PHPBoyScout?
Since 2016 I’ve jumped around in my career a lot! This has exposed me to a lot of new languages and tech, all of which has been awesome but it now means that the moniker of PHPBoyScout probably isn’t accurate all that much any more. That said I still have a love for PHP and my first thought when presented with a new challenge is still “How would I approach this using PHP?”, so I think that means I can keep my twitter handle for a little longer rather than re-brand myself :-D
I’ve always had a penchant for picking up languages pretty quickly and have been an advocate of the idea that as long as you can think in the right way then languages can be learnt easily enough.
Employed and Employable
October 2017 saw me take on a new role with a company called Medicines Discovery Catapult. They are a grant funded not for profit organisation that is specifically focused on shaking up the medicine discovery pipeline by helping SMEs & CROs innovate and collaborate.
My role is very broad as I appear to have fallen in to the role of Head of Software Engineering very quickly. Though I started as a DevOps Engineer it has evolved very quickly. We work with a wide array of languages and tools and nothing is off the table if it helps to solve the problems we are working on. Currently we actively have code being written in Python, Node, Go & Scala (I live in hope that I’ll be ale to bring PHP into that mix eventually). Vast data sets and AI are the name of the game with my team of engineers helping to support the data scientists and Informaticians.
At the time of writing we are also hiring so if you are curious take a look at https://md.catapult.org.uk/about/careers/ and see if you like the sound of what we are doing and the challenge on offer.
Moving forward
The plan moving forward is to post about the tech we are working with, talk about the types of challenges we are facing and also maybe restart my public speaking career. Stay tuned for more and if you don’t hear from me soon then give me a nudge