Alexander Collins

Software Engineer
Computer Science Graduate

About

A UK-based software engineer who started programming at 17 to explore the possibility of a career and ended up making it into a hobby as well. My main goal is always to get a job done within the given time frame, next to that I try to create simple & efficient solutions that can be easily understood.

Background

I taught myself to program in C through online tutorials in my late teens (shout out to wibit.net). The initial end goal of this was to see if I'd enjoy a degree in it, I went on to study a Bachelor (Honours) in Computer Science at University of the West of England for 4 years.

For my third year of university I interned at Intel for a 14 months and built full stack IoT demos to showcase Intel technology. This gave me full-stack development experience, using my C skills to write firmware for microcontrollers and NodeJS to write a server & end-user web interface to visualise the data.

During middle of my fourth & final year at university I started working at the series-A startup company: AppSecTest, where I was one of two engineers to build a SAAS platform that provided a static analysis engine to decompile Android applications to check for & compare security, legal and privacy compliance. This company was eventually bought out by OneTrust, where I continued my tenure integrating the engine as one of their cloud services.

Ethos

Since graduating in Computer Science, I've started spending a lot of time on personal projects. These projects are often technology-related but sometimes range to other mediums like photography or writing. I always use it as an opportunity to learn something new, improve a skill set, or experiment; they vary from small hobby-projects to time-vampires.
I've found these projects are really good for catharsis and keeping my personal growth & passions from stagnating.

Outside of software development and other projects, I love going to music gigs & festivals, metal gigs are certainly the most fun. I grew up in forest-town and really enjoy wandering around woods, exploring new places and going on hikes.
Gaming is how I wind-down when I get a minute, I've been a big PC gamer since I was young and getting old games to run is one of the things got me into technology in the first place.

Contact

If you want to get in touch, please do at: moc.kooltuo@snilloc-rednaxela