About me
tl;dr I'm a backend-leaning full-stack lead software engineer based in Bristol, UK.
Education
I hold a BSc (Hons) in cybersecurity and digital forensics, and an MSc in cybersecurity and IoT, both from Bournemouth University.
Why do I have a master's degree? I wasn't sure what I wanted to do after completing my undergraduate degree. So, I decided to stick around for another year to postpone making such a big decision - very healthy 👌.
Why do I have either degree? Well, at the time, it seemed like the best and only way into the tech industry. Was it worth it? I'm not convinced I've used either of them directly since graduating, but I had 5 years to learn how to learn, a skill I use every day. I don't think it's worth the crippling pile of debt it left me with, but it would be amiss to say that they haven't brought me value.
Work history
The uni years
During my university studies, I worked as a security analyst with Kingfisher plc. If you've not heard of them, they own B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama, and Brico Depot across the UK and Europe.
Post-uni
What about when I ran out of degrees to study? (A PhD really wasn't appealing). In 2018, I joined Immersive (then Immersive Labs), a cybersecurity upskilling company - they never liked us referring to ourselves as a training company, but that's what we were to our customers.
We've expanded a lot since then, and are now the human cyber resilience platform; from technical cybersecurity training to crisis simulation, we cover the lot.
I started as a cybersecurity engineer, building hands-on technical labs for our platform that taught users a whole range of security skills, knowledge, and tools.
As the team grew, I took on more and more roles and responsibilities, architecting new, consistent approaches to building labs, developing internal tooling for building labs, creating new tools and frameworks for use within labs, and building CI/CD pipelines for safely deploying labs into production.
What the heck is a lab?
A lab is one part of the Immersive platform. We spin up labs on demand, with each user getting their own isolated instance. A lab can house one or more machines, enabling us to build complex and realistic environments. For example, we have labs that allow users to attack servers or run investigations using a SIEM in their own sandboxed environments, right from their browser.
Towards the end of my time on Immersive's cyber team (then called the content team), I worked on some of our early cyber range content just after Immersive acquired a company that provided range technology.
By 2023, I'd become something of a "stealth software engineer". I was primarily working on software projects for the team, but without the safety of being a formal software-focused resource. Translation: I didn't want my name to appear on any list during layoff rounds.
I had been bored and disillusioned with working in cyber roles for a while, so I formally seconded to the engineering team in 2023, working on cross-team software projects that were slated as critical at the time. In 2024, I moved to the engineering team permanently as a lead full-stack engineer.
I now work and consult on a range of engineering projects, providing technical leadership and architectural direction. While I'm formally a full-stack engineer, my interest lies primarily in backend, where I find the challenges more interesting and engaging than those of frontend development - this is personal preference, I have nothing against frontend, it's just not my cup of tea.