Haydon Houghton

A young back-end developer who has just graduated from Makers Academy. With an educational background involving CompSci, prior experience as a freelancing developer and work experience in the dev team at Echo Pharmacy, I'd bring a rock-solid foundation ready to be built up for any team, with a generous side helping of raw enthusiasm.

Projects

Over my time at Makers, I built a few different projects to "learn how to learn" new technologies and how to properly work alongside other developers in groups. These projects also provided a first-hand experience of meeting user briefs and working to strict requirements.

Soft Skills

Adaptability After moving countries twice and changing schools 3 times, being adaptable became second nature - and it was only pushed further in facilities management. Whether it be adapting to the needs of workers when planning a warehouse refurbish or adjusting to ever-changing user requirements, I'm more than capable.

Problem Solving With a logical mindset built up from A-Level Maths, playing video games (who'd have thought they'd ever be useful?) and managing warehouse facilities, I can find efficient solutions to problems fast. This is, of course, very helpful when your rubber ducky debugger refuses to spit up the goods.

Resilience Writing code can be tough. You try 1,300 different things and none of them work. You've got 17 Stack Overflow tabs open but they're all marked as duplicates and you just want to pull your hair out. Being resilient means you can get through another 1,300 different approaches without feeling disheartened, because it definitely is possible. Though usually it won't take that long.

Fast Learning The Makers Academy bootcamp is only 12 weeks long. In that time, I digested a huge amount of information everyday. Similarly, in my A-Level CompSci final project, I learned how to use the TKinter library with a backend SQL database in a matter of a couple months. I've become great at learning new things in a short timeframe.

Tech Stack

• Ruby and testing libraries RSpec and Capybara

• Python 3.6 and REDIS, a NoSQL data structure

• SQL with Postgres and MySQL.

Education

Makers Academy (January - April 2020 )

• OOP, TDD, MVC, DDD
• Agile/XP
• Ruby, Rails, JavaScript
• RSpec, Jasmine

The Palmer Catholic Academy (2015-2019)

Chosen to be a Prefect in Year 11 and elected by my peers for Deputy Head Boy in Year 13, I made the most of my time at school by putting myself out there for new challenges like the UKMT Senior Maths Challenge (where I achieved a bronze reward), and teaching younger students how to use Python for their Year 11 Computing coursework.

A Level Qualifications

-Mathematics A

-Computer Science A

-Geography B

GCSEs

5 A*s (Including Maths and English) and 4 As (Including Computer Science and Sciences)

IES Bendinat (Spain, 2012-2015)

I started my secondary education in sunny Mallorca - I learned all the normal stuff, except in Spanish, which made things much more interesting. I picked up a foreign language in a foreign land, I can definitely pick up a foreign programming language on a foreign computer!

Experience

Echo Pharmacy (July 2019 - November 2019)
Facilities Assistant

• Communicating with those in the workplace and delivering optimal solutions for people's needs required logical and straight-to-the-point thinking. Missing deadlines meant operations could come to a halt, so I learnt to work with the pressure of many people depending on my actions.

Freelance Software Development (November 2018 - May 2019)
Junior Developer

• Learning the ropes of asynchronous Python as a part-time developer for a Discord bot used in a 10,000+ user community. See Kiara, A Discord Bot, for more on the code. I learned to take a brief and create a tool that was fitting to what the moderation team needed and get it to them in a suitable timeframe.

Echo Pharmacy (Summer 2018) Work-Experience in Software Development

• Experienced my first taste of real-world software development by shadowing devs and giving thoughts in weekly stand-ups. I was taught about GitHub team workflow, and witnessed the deployment of a major refactor in the Operation tech tools. This is a big reason as to why I'm here today!

Ryman Stationery (August 2017 - September 2018 Part Time)
Sales Assistant

• Worked within a team to surpass sales goals, interacting with customers was the bulk of this job. Overall, the most important aspect of my role was building a good reputation for the brand with customers so that they'd want to come back again.

Hobbies

Video Games - Nothing I love more than sitting down with a few friends and playing some fun, challenging games.

Photoshop - GFX to be more specific! Bringing together different graphic renders and playing with colour pallettes is a nice way of expressing some creativity.

Reading - just to get away from the real world for a while! Recently I started reading The Clean Coder, to start broadening my knowledge on TDD.