What am I doing here? (Not on in an existential crisis kind of way)

I wouldn’t be a millennial if I didn’t start with a self-deprecating caveat that I am very very very far from being an expert on this. This is just a bit of fun for me to do. I’ve always enjoyed learning new things and tinkering (in the past with the Adobe creative applications like Photoshop, Indesign and now mostly using Apple iMovie for fun holiday videos) and with my partner James being an ML engineer, there’s a lot of conversation about AI in the household!

James has also been very encouraging of me to have “my own place on the internet” and actually bought my domain name as a present. He’s been by my side for every step of this little project (and literally as we spend every minute together traveling). With AI looking to play a big part in the future, I'd like to explore it for myself and see if it fits into my set of tools both for work and creative projects. I will go into detail on my thoughts and experiences in some future posts. So, shoutout to James as this website would not be here without him.

Did I have any starting knowledge? Not really!

My first experience of coding was on the graduate programme at Vodafone in 2016. I was in the digital e-commerce team as my first placement, where we used the Agile ‘Kanban’ methodology to update the Vodafone website. I got to experience the end to end process of how updates were made, which included doing some very basic HTML and CSS updates using a content editor. I was intrigued…but my next placement was in the commercial team, which stole my corporate heart (if that’s a thing!)

Since then, most of my direct experience was using the ‘inspect’ function on a webpage to see what was going on, purely out of interest. I also convinced my sister and my dad to do an html/ css evening crash course with me in 2019, which turned out to be the evening before my Baringa interview.

At Virgin Media (where I was in between Vodafone and Baringa), I had some exposure to SQL and databases as well as digital/website teams again. One of my first projects at Baringa was a tech transformation project where I was embedded within a team of developers. I supported the design of the technical process that enabled e2e customer journeys, across multiple systems. I absolutely loved sitting down for hours drawing out architecture diagrams and process flows!

So, where is this going?

Fast forward to today. I’ve been at Baringa for four years and in September this year, took advantage of their “leave of absence” (or sabbatical policy) by taking September - December unpaid leave. James and I are spending the majority of the time traveling through Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Bali. James has been semi running his own business on the side, having quit his job earlier this year. We knew when we were planning our travels that he would need to be working on this during our trip. I wanted my own project (and probably we both would have done this anyway even if he wasn’t doing this business) and this seemed like a fun way to learn something new, work on something that helps me understand James’ world a bit better, keep my brain working whilst essentially on a long holiday and maybe bring some useful knowledge back to work in January.

I’m not sure where this is going long term but I know that I like learning new stuff, especially when it’s a bit hard. I also enjoy documenting and writing. So even if zero people read this, I will have enjoyed the process. I also really enjoy sharing my experiences and helping other people. If any of this does that, it would be an added bonus! Or, it will just be my poor work team having to indulge me and hear about it all when I’m back.