Learning to code

Every developer has an origin story...

Mine started in sticky-floored music venues.

I spent most of my late teens and early 20s buried deep in the alternative music scene. I was the classic emo kid in a Blink-182 t-shirt or an Alkaline Trio hoodie.

Most of my friends were in bands and I’d spend weekends touring around the UK with them selling merch or helping with promotion.

Eventually my mate Saul and I started our own club night.

We called it “Monkey! Knife! Fight!”.

It made a lot of sense at the time.

We booked whatever artists we could afford and somehow managed to start selling out venues across Bristol. After the first year people were even starting to take us seriously as promoters.

Looking back, it suited our personalities perfectly.

Saul was the salesman.

I handled the logistics.

We were basically the grunge version of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. I don’t love being cast as Woz in this analogy, but it scans.

The problem was that none of this was building an actual career.

By around 2012 I realised I needed to change direction. I was tired of living pay cheque to pay cheque and drifting through jobs that felt increasingly meaningless.

So I made a slightly terrifying decision:

I went back to university to study Computer Science.

I had no idea at the time how much that decision was about to change my life.

Uni days

University was a shock to the system.

I’d confidently enrolled on a Computer Science conversion Masters. “Conversion course” made it sound a lot more straightforward than it actually was.

The first semester hit me like a sledgehammer.

I’d completely underestimated how much I needed to rewire my brain. Programming demanded a level of precision and structured thinking I’d never experienced before.

People had always described me as logical, but it still took countless late nights of relentless study before logical thinking started to feel natural.

My first major programming assignment in C was a brutal lesson in humility.

You couldn’t even get a passing grade unless the software met the acceptance criteria exactly.

Mine did.

Just barely.

But gradually, something started to click.

Somewhere along the way I realised something surprising:

I was actually good at this.

I graduated with distinction the following year.

When front-end became cool

A week after graduating I landed my first junior developer role.

I was so desperate for professional experience that I basically took the first job that sounded remotely interesting.

It was at a digital agency called Red7, building web games and gambling apps.

That’s how I spent my first year in tech:

making slot machines and getting disconcertingly good at blackjack.

The products themselves aren’t really the important part of the story though.

What mattered was that the job introduced me to JavaScript.

This was 2014, so JavaScript was still a slightly chaotic ecosystem held together with optimism and jQuery.

But I’d accidentally caught the beginning of something huge.

The language was evolving incredibly fast and suddenly front-end development wasn’t just becoming respectable.

It felt exciting.

By 2015 it truly felt like the coolest place in tech.

React

Around that time I joined another agency called Somo.

To this day I still measure all other jobs against that one.

I was only there for a couple of years, but I’m still friends with a lot of the people I worked with during that time. Honestly, it was probably the happiest period of my career.

Maybe React was inevitable.

I'd spent my adult life chasing whatever looked exciting.

First it was alternative music.

Then it was club nights.

Then it was web development.

React just happened to be the most exciting thing in the room when I walked in.

At the time it felt genuinely new and slightly disruptive. Front-end development suddenly became a place where huge ideas were happening.

Somo was the perfect environment for that kind of energy.

The company believed in experimentation and we had all sorts of unusual projects in flight. I’d done some Unity work at university, which somehow resulted in me leading a virtual reality showroom app for Audi in 2016.

We even got nominated for an award for it.

Just saying.

Going solo

In 2017 an unexpected opportunity appeared.

A connection approached me about a contract role in New York working with another agency. There was just one catch:

I’d have to leave Somo and go freelance to take it.

At that point though, I could already feel the momentum building in my career, so I took the plunge into contracting.

I loved it.

Running my own business weirdly suited me. I discovered that I’m apparently the kind of person who actually enjoys calculating pension contributions and filing taxes.

If only that emo kid from the music scene could see me now. It would confuse the hell out of him.

Over the next couple of years I worked with a lot of different companies and got a rare glimpse into how very different tech organisations actually operate internally.

That experience taught me a lot.

Not just about software engineering, but about compromise. About when speed matters more than perfection. About when cutting corners is pragmatic and when it becomes dangerous.

I pushed hard for two years.

Too hard, probably.

By the end of 2019 I could already feel the early signs of burnout creeping in and started thinking about returning to permanent employment.

Of course, I had absolutely no idea how much the world was about to change.

Future Alex

Early 2020 was a difficult time for me.

Even before Covid-19.

My personal life had become complicated and I’d decided to take some time off to travel before committing to another permanent role.

I could not possibly have timed this worse.

I had essentially chosen unemployment right before the entire world locked down.

Suddenly I had all the time in the world.

I spent my days running, playing PlayStation and reading War and Peace mostly because it seemed like the sort of challenge lockdown was designed for.

Honestly, applying for Aforza initially felt more like grabbing a life raft than making some grand career plan.

I wasn’t expecting it to become a long-term thing.

But it did.

Very quickly I found myself helping architect major parts of the platform and leading frontend development across multiple products.

What started as React Native mobile work gradually expanded into web frontend, backend systems and a whole lot more responsibility than I'd originally signed up for.

About eighteen months later I officially moved into a lead role and formed a new team around their latest mobile app.

Then in 2025 I was promoted again to Principal Engineer.

But strangely, titles aren’t really the part that changed me most.

Before this job I’d worked on a lot of greenfield projects, but I’d never stayed anywhere long enough to truly experience the consequences of my own technical decisions.

Long-term product development changes the way you think.

Suddenly architecture decisions stop being abstract discussions on whiteboards and start becoming very real problems Future You has to live with.

Consequences become visceral.

That experience matured me enormously as both an engineer and a technical leader.

These days I have a much greater appreciation for Future Alex and whatever poor team has to inherit my decisions.

Here’s hoping I don’t let him down.