Alan Hutcheson

My love for coding has come from my passion for problem solving and a desire to have a meaningful and positive impact in society, by building things that improve people’s lives and help solve real-world problems. I am a self-taught developer, who feels very fortunate to have a personal hobby turn into a career. Since my first experience of programming in 2016, and online book called ‘Python the Hard Way’, I have been constantly taking on side-projects that help me practise and continue to develop and learn. I have always enjoyed learning new skills and picking up new hobbies, and this applies to my career also. I am always keen to try new technologies and step out of my comfort zone to help me build up a rounded skillset that allows me to build and deliver applications that bring a social benefit. This is something that really motivates me and is something that I pursue in my free time, outside my 9-5. In the past year I have worked on a few projects that fit this category: - Phone a Friend (CoronaUnity - https://www.coronaunity.org/): A charity project aimed at connecting isolated and lonely individuals in the UK with volunteers for an informal phone call, over lockdown - Doodle (https://doodle-game.io/): An online multiplayer game where players take turns drawing and describing wacky scenarios. The game has reached 62 countries with almost 3,000 completed games - CoffeeBreak: A Slackbot that randomly matches users for a 30-minute coffee and a chat each week. This came out of a lockdown-wellbeing hackathon and the app was run at Deloitte Digital with over 50 users - Carbon Emissions Measurement Tool: A tool that tracks business travel, providing a set of dashboards that allows management and users to understand their personal and their projects’ emissions profile Professionally, I have worked as both a freelancer (mainly mobile apps and websites) and as a full-time engineer at Deloitte Digital. I have worked solely on public sector clients, delivering large scale web applications and managing their cloud infrastructure. Throughout my time here I have worked across all technical roles in the software delivery cycle; front-end, backend, dev ops and automation testing. At this point in time I am leading the Solution Engineering practice at OpenSC - managing a team of 9 engineers across 25 projects - where we are at a period now of growth, and so are looking at the standardisation and automation of the role to enable scaleability.