Richard John Black
Junior Software Developer
Hello and welcome to my website! My name is Richard and I'm a Junior Developer from Birmingham, currently looking for my first professional role as a Junior Software Engineer. The site has been designed to showcase the projects I have built or collaborated on, as well documenting my professional experience and a little bit about my hobbies, interests, and life in general outside of coding. Who knows, if I have some thoughts on my mind I think are worth expressing, I might even start writing a blog on here too!
Please have a poke around, check out the projects on the portfolio section, and contact me with any feedback or comments you might have about anything you see on here. I'm always eager to learn as much as I can, and I'm always willing to listen and take onboard the advice and opinions of others.
Professional Experience
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CodeVerse Python Bootcamp (May 2022)
Studied Python on a 4-week software engineering & digital skills bootcamp provided by CodeVerse.
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Northcoders (Jan 2022 - April 2022)
Studied full-stack software development on a 13-week coding bootcamp in JavaScript. Followed an industry-led practical curriculum which teaches best practices such as version control with git, pair programming, agile practices (stand-ups, Kanban boards, retros etc), CI/CD, test-driven development, and Functional and Object-Orientated programming paradigms.
Click to expand course project details...
Front-end Project - News App
I built a mobile first designed front-end architecture in React that acts as a news app to serve news articles via integration with the back-end project News API. The app was built utilising NodeJS, CSS, HTML5, and Material UI.
Back-end Project - News API
I built a RESTful API to interact with a PostgreSQL database, incorporating MVC programming principles in order to provide data to the front-end news app project. Built with Express utilising full TDD incorporating the Jest library and Supertest.
Final Project - Tremolo
As part of a 5-person team I created an app that enables musicians to network via geolocation and post classified ads for collaborating with each other. The front-end architecture was built using Svelte, hosted as a Progressive Web Application, and integrated with Firebase for the database and user authentication implementation.
My coding journey begins...
After being made redundant in 2020 from my position as an Account Manager at FIS, where I had worked continuously for almost 10 years, I decided to take some time out from working to consider my next career move. After assessing what options were available to me, I decided to embark on a new journey in software development via the Northcoders full stack JavaScript bootcamp that was being offered via the UK Government re-skilling programme.
As I worked through the learning materials required to pass the entry challenge for the course, it became clear to me that coding was not just something that I found immensely interesting and absorbing but also extremely enjoyable and rewarding.
Thankfully, after a short but intensive period of study, I was able to pass the course entry challenge and began life as a Northcoders student in January 2022. For the next 3 months, I fully immersed myself in the course syllabus and lived and breathed JavaScript each and every day. Although the experience was incredibly tough, challenging, and at times even quite disheartening (imposter syndrome is a real thing), I thoroughly enjoyed the experience as a whole, met some inspiring people, made some new friends, and discovered a new lifelong love of code!
Since graduating in April 2022, I have continued practising and developing my technical skills and absorbing as much knowledge as possible. In May 2022 I enrolled on a short Python bootcamp with CodeVerse and after the completion of that I have worked on further educational personal projects and exercises. Today I am excited to continue my coding career in a professional capacity and I'm eagerly anticipating future personal challenges and opportunities within the industry.
Please take some time to look over this site and the projects presented on my Portfolio page. If you wish to contact me regarding any potential professional opportunities, my details can be found on the Contact page of this site. I'd also love to hear from you regarding any feedback you might have about this site, or even if you wish to connect with me regarding some of my extra-curricular activities that are detailed on here too.
I hope you enjoy your visit to my site and the content contained within!