Somebody asked me today for "Alex in five charts".
I considered it but realised I couldn't take it seriously. Nobody actually wants to read a Gantt chart of my employment history, so here is "my career in 20 memes" instead.
I did a degree in Mathematics in the noughties. My final year project was a machine learning thing that tracked hand gestures on a webcam, and it ended up being exhibited at the university.
I started my career at Experian as an analyst working on the models behind credit scoring. Except for the little bits of software development I could fit in, I thought it was overly micromanaged, bureaucratic and boring.
So I learned to code proper and begged for a software development job with no experience. Luckily a lovely small electronics manufacturer in the Peak District took me on and I helped them develop an IoT system at decent scale.
To actually learn how to program I didn't want the boring examples that came with the tutorials, so I wrote a GameBoy emulator in .NET instead. It only took me five years and it never worked that well. I managed to get Scott Hanselman to blog about it though by hassling him on Twitter.
I got massively into testing & code quality in a world where some people still reckoned tests were pointless.
I felt like I'd overly siloed myself into a single technology stack and wanted to advertise myself as a "full stack developer" instead of a ".NET developer" so I made some hard swerves around 10 years into my career to collect as much experience as I could.
I enjoyed over engineering data driven systems by using the "big data" excuse. But was it "big data"...? Or just "data"?
Microservices were massive. For a while. Until people, including me, realised that not every company is running at the scale of Netflix.
Then there were the JavaScript frameworks: JQuery, Angular, Vue.js and React. I've done them all and loved each one unconditionally at some point.
Looking back, I worked at some actually nice companies including charitable non-profits and others with really cool tech-for-good products. I also did a stint in government, which, given what the civil service pays, was basically charity on my part. Then I sold my soul and went into banking.
From 2022 it has been contracts all the way.
I spent three and a half years moving a 30 year old system onto a modern stack. It was painful and I am still blown away that we pulled it off at all.
I was raising a young family during this time so understandably had very little time for extra curricular software development.
I am currently working through Equal Experts at HMRC doing AI platform stuff. I am glad AI is cool again, I just wish I'd stuck with it back when I was experimenting with it in 2010.
I have embraced AI coding agents in a big way.
I keep multiple agents going from my phone all day long, and my wife now reckons she's a Claude widow. 🤣
This will age badly but AI coding agents still only accelerate 99% of my job rather than replace it. I hardly ever write code now, instead expending most of my effort guiding an agent through requirements whilst trying not to fall into a tangle of slop.
In 2026 I feel devastated for a lost art & hobby. I got into all of this because I loved writing code. I have been known throughout my career for the ability to "just get stuff done", no matter how complex, and now that seems archaic.
Convincing Claude to keep working longer, avoiding slop and drawing on my 15+ years' experience to guide a coding agent is apparently what I do now.
Twenty memes instead of five charts.