My name is Christos Loucaides, and I am a First Class, BSc (Hons) Computer Science with Management graduate, from Queen Mary, University of London.
I initially built this website as part of my "Fundamentals of Web Technologies module", back in 2020 during my first year of university, but have decided to keep it up to date, in order to showcase some skills and experiences that I've picked up throughout the years. One such example would be that I've set up a CI/CD pipeline for this site through GitHub actions, meaning all my changes are deployed as soon as I hit ctr+shift+k on my IDE!
Although I consider myself fortunate that programming, one of my hobbies, has become my career, I also find joy in engaging with various other activities during my spare time, such as:
Excited to be starting a new role at GiffGaff very soon! Check back in a few weeks to see what I get up to!
Upon graduating from university, I started working as an engineer at Marshmallow, and currently work
in the domain of car insurance retention. As a Scale-Up the work at Marshmallow is interesting,
and challenging, as the company aims to solve key problems for migrants coming into the UK.
This role has allowed me help tackle said problems, through owning the implementation of new features in
Spring Boot microservices. I've also taken additional responsibilities, such as assuming the role
of a 'Support Engineer', where I monitored the health of our service and dealt with related support requests,
as well as incident remediation.
Secured a year-long internship at Sky, where I worked as a backend Java developer. I focused on the development and maintenance of greenfield and brownfield backend Java applications, whilst following agile practices such as Kanban, Test Driven Development (TDD/ATDD) and Behaviour Driven Development to implement new business requirements.
Selected to assist at lab sessions and assessment for Computer Science modules at Queen Mary, which I scored highly in during my first and second years. Helping first-year students with these modules has allowed me to further understand some of the concepts taught.
Worked at Socialway eServices together with the company's web team on various client websites. This included managing and updating page content through a CMS (Wordpress). I was also tasked with improving the SEO of some client pages through JSON-LD Schema types. By the end of my internship I had written a program to do this automatically.
As part of my national service, I served 14 months as an artillery soldier. More specifically, I was a Radio and Communications Specialist, and part of my duty was contacting my battalion's brigade on a daily basis using mil-spec radio equipment, as well as operating the unit's communication center.
While I primarily specialise in backend Java development, I've worked with a multitude of different languages and frameworks, for both university and personal projects!
