Fin Cardy

About

Who am I?

Hi, my name’s Fin and I’m a contract web developer living in Greater Manchester. I’m a full-stack developer with a passion for frontend development, specifically JavaScript-based technologies such as React and Redux. On the backend, I have a significant amount of experience with PHP using frameworks such as CodeIgniter and Laravel, and Node backed by MongoDB. I’m also very comfortable with Linux and networking principles, and have experience in administering servers - both dedicated and cloud-based services with a preference for AWS in the latter.

Web development has been a hobby of mine since I was very young, and I feel as a result of that it’s a “language” I understand well. For 23 years I have been constantly learning, adapting and updating my skills simply out of a sincere, deep-rooted love of it and I hope to continue that for as long as possible.

History

I built my first website in 1998 at the age of 13. It was hideous but nevertheless it was something I had made and I loved it. Web development became a lifelong passion. As a teenager I built websites for local bands using whatever “new” technology I could get my hands on, moving through Fireworks, Flash, ASP Classic, XHTML & CSS and PHP.

At University I studied Sound and Video Technology, during which I learned a very early version of Ruby on Rails to use for my dissertation project. At the same time I worked in computer hardware retail where I gained a large amount of knowledge, and eventually worked my way up into marketing. I dusted off my PHP skills, and picked up jQuery too, in order to build marketing tools and began revamping the HTML email campaigns. It was here where I began to suspect web development was something that I could graduate from a hobby to a full time career.

In late 2013 I began working at an agency in Manchester on a long-term project that involved a suite of 12 interlinked CodeIgniter systems for a large financial web application. Within 6 months I was promoted to senior developer and began taking on projects that improved the UX for the application, including a lot of jQuery work. Front end development became an increasing source of fascination for me and I began to learn more about the JavaScript ecosystem. After a few years I found myself wanting to work more exclusively with the front end work and found a job working with another agency in Manchester. During this time I worked alongside big name organisations such as the BBC, JISC and the Hull 2017 City of Culture team on a variety of very technically challenging projects utilising a variety of technologies.

The majority of projects used were built with React and Redux, a working method I became very fond of and one which has remained my preferred working method ever since. In my time there I also worked on a high profile and high traffic WordPress eCommerce site (utilising React and the WooCommerce plugin), internal DevOps tools using Jenkins as a CI with automated deployments to AWS, and in some capacity on projects using Laravel and Zend.

From there I moved on to a property tech start-up where I was tasked with updating front end features of their main product built in Laravel using Vue, build front ends for greenfield projects using the React/Redux stack powered by a Laravel back end, and my knowledge of cloud-based computing was also utilized with technologies such as Amazon Lambda for PDF generation and Cloudfront for reducing server load.

In 2020 I made the decision to become self-employed and, in-between breaks, have worked on various PHP-based projects including use of the Laravel-based OctoberCMS and Wordpress.

Spare Time

In my spare time I like walking, playing guitar, gaming and painting tiny plastic spacemen.