About

Hi I’m Mark, I fly planes and write code, here’s a bit about me!

My first computer was an Amiga 600, which I spent many hours in front of playing games and wondering how the hell this thing worked. I then discovered the web a few years later when we got our first PC, a Windows 95 behemouth with a whooping 2GB hard drive and 32 mb ram. I then started dabbling with god awful “websites” on GeoCities and built several band websites. One of these won website of the month in a local scene website, purely because it was so bad (each paragraph was a different colour AND FONT; different times!).

Fast forward a few years and I was working in an HR Department churning out contracts with lots of manual processes kicking about. I’m lazy, I didn’t like this, so I started writing tools based in Excel to speed up some boring calculations we had to do, I then discovered macros and then quickly discovered their limitations. So, I bought my first coding book Programming VBA For Dummies, I started doing an HND in computer and my life changed! This was over 10 years ago.

Management liked that I could now automate lots of processes and I was able to add more and more coding tasks to my job as I found more to automate. This stopped me from loosing my mind as the place was so boring and my days started flying in. I quickly discovered our Management Information team, they dealt purely in reporting and automationg things, perfect, not long after I was working with them. I then got to the stage where I could make the entire Microsoft Office suite sing, Access generating reports, automating MS Word, Outlook etc and generating reports in a matter hours that took someone full time a month to do :). I also picked up C# here and decided to further my learning by doing Microsoft Certifications. I had hoped to go to Uni after I did my HND but money and time (I’d just had a kid at this time!), or lack of both, meant I couldn’t.

Soon I out grew this job and moved on to my first job that actually had “Software Developer” in the title, though by this stage I had 4 years under my belt. I was working on websites in C# .Net web forms using Kentico CMS as the backend and also had to do all the front end work as well. A big learning curve as I hadn’t done web dev before this (except for my Geocities days!) but I loved this. I tend to pick things up quickly so was soon churning out websites for an all manner of clients. One of the coolest things I worked on here was a Facebook app for NMNI, users could sign up for the app and have a video auto generated using info from their profile. They could then watch their own custom video right there, I did this in a few long days learning how to automate Adobe Aftereffects, I actually wrote a post about it on their forums as I figured out how to make it work, sadly the video has been long pulled.

I then moved onto my next role as a .Net Software developer for Intelligent Environments. This brought another learning curve as I went from .Net web forms to MVC and n tier architecture, I also had to get my head around something called “design patterns”. But this was the reason for my move, and pretty much all moves, to learn, to grow and not settle. Here I worked on a financial product, having input at all levels, intitially on the website before being promoted to senior and moving to the backend, where I’ve pretty much stayed ever since. In 2016 we started a re-architecture of the product, which included micro services and our language of choice for these was Go. I fell in love with the language, especially it’s simplicity.

I’m now working at Teamwork and loving it, it’s probably the first “cool”, modern company I’ve worked for who embrace modern working practises and really look after their staff. I’m working as a Senior Go Developer for our new product which has been built in Belfast (no Titanic jokes please, it was fine when it left here) called Teamwork Spaces, go check it out, it’s pretty damn great!

And here I am, still have the coding bug big time, still love learning new stuff, my current thing is Graph Databases and State Machines which I beaver away on in the evenings. I’m interested in how these can help an organisation like mine with highly distributed data improve querying and understanding their information as well as ensuring resiliency. I’m also keeping an eye on GoBot a Go based SDK for coding robots etc, I think this along with a drone, could be a great to introduce coding to my kids! Most nights I’m on the computer, working on personal projects, websites for other people, reading about new technologies or watching confernece videos. Also, I own and fly an airplane, you should totally check out my flying blog, hence the “flying” in the theflyingcodr!

Hope this hasn’t been too long, feel free to get in touch on twitter or LinkedIn.