When I was 18, like most people that age, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I'd just finished my A levels, and had been offered a place at the University of Nottingham to study Physics. I'd always been vaguely good at science/maths/STEM in general so, like the reason behind so many decisions we make, it just made sense.

I mean, sure, I found Physics interesting enough. Even the idea of going into academia when I'd finished the course didn't seem like it would be the most awful thing in the world. Still, it was in my first year there when we'd be introduced to the computational side of the subject that I found my true passion. Programming.

I was awful at it. Like, really bad. But we all start somewhere, even if that 'somewhere' is the dark recesses of a Matlab IDE, and getting cross that the array indexes start at 1 rather than 0 (absolutely disgusting). A lot of the stuff I'd be doing was collecting data from external equipment, and plotting a graph out of it. Hardly the most exciting stuff. It did, however, spur me on to start looking at other programming languages when I had free time. Python first, then JavaScript, then Java. I wasn't making anything super exciting using these languages. Mostly just reading from the language reference book (I'd actually asked for the Java 9 complete reference for my 19th birthday), and doing the little coding excercises at the end of the chapters.

The next two years passed as I learnt more and more. At some point I'd decided that I wanted to be a web developer during that time, and it was in my third year that I discovered (by accident actually) that the university had an internship scheme. Essentially, companies would hire interns from the university, and the university would subsidise our pay which was kinda neat. I applied to a tonne of different software developer intern positions, and ended up interviewing for a company called inniAccounts in Derby who offered me the job not half an hour after I'd left the building (shoud have seen the smile on my face).

I spent 8 weeks with inniAccounts, mostly working on their business accounts application. I forget many of the details of the work I did there, but one major part of it was trying to get receipt transcription working. The idea being that someone could take a picture of a receipt, and that image would be used to update their accounts with what they'd spent, all without them having to manually type in anything. Image recognition was a bit beyond us, and so we tried to get a Mechanical Turk system working - essentially meaning that there would be someone, somewhere, reading the data from the image and typing it in for us.

In my final year of university, we had to choose a project - naturally I went for the most computational one possibly. It was interesting enough. We were simulating the vibrations of atoms in a crystal lattice when excited by a laser using a program I'd written myself (I promise it's a lot less complex than it sounds - I used some third party software that did all the hard bits for us).

The internship, and the final project were the major stepping stones to the job I'm currently in now with Digitalk. I remember when I turned up at the interview, I spent a while demonstrating (I'd taken my laptop with me) the code I'd written for the final year project

I've been working at Digitalk for 5+ years now, in all that time I've never lost any of the passion for writing code, and I don't expect to soon. I've also got plenty of side projects to keep me busy at home too!