Hey! I’m Dan 👋

In my previous blog, I mentioned that I think there are four main components to a great senior software engineer. I thought I would use this post to dive into those points a little more: 🌱 Cultivate Growth Great senior software engineers are not only focused on their own growth but also on empowering their teams. From what I have observed, the best mentors are those that allow juniors to make mistakes and try to find the solution with themselves rather than leading them directly to the answer. Promoting this sense of finding the answers within ones-self is actually a very good skill for lots of aspects of life and in my view, leads to the most successful outcomes. Conversely, there is a fine line between promoting self-originating answers and leaving someone to hit their head against a wall when they are stuck, so keep vigilant! ...

The Beginning Ever since I was a little boy, I have always been fascinated by technology and games. My first introduction to the world of gaming was the Sega Megadrive, where I played classics like Sonic the Hedgehog and The Lion King in my mum’s old bedroom at my Grandmother’s home. Around my 9th birthday, we got our first Gameboy Advance SP Tribal edition (yes, we were those cool kids) along with my favorite Pokémon game, Pokémon Ruby. I spent countless hours playing it in my younger years and still emulate it to this day on my Steam Deck. ...

Intro On Friday the 18th of November I embarked on a journey to Luton for IBM’s first Hackathon for the Hyperledger fabric and Blockchain technology. My initial interest in this event came from my lecturer when I was approached by her, and she asked if I’d like to attend. It’s worth mentioning here that I’d never attended a hackathon before the weekend of the 18th, but I knew of what they were and I had been interested in attending one for a long while, so I was keen. Same kind of story for blockchain, I knew of the technology, I mean for anyone that’s heard of Bitcoin will also know of the term blockchain so this also sparked my interest. I think now would be a good time to explain a bit about the technologies that were involved during the hacakthon event for those that may be a bit in the dark at this point, so if you already know about Hyperledger and blockchain technologies feel free to scroll past the explanations. ...

As some of you reading this may or may not already know; over the past day or so I went from having the idea of creating a computer program that would essentially be able to play the popular arcade game Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, to actually developing it. Now as hard as this problem sounds, it was surprisingly easy and fairly swift to solve. I broke it down into three main steps: ...