David Brown

Hi! Areas where I help people learning to develop software:
• Syntax, structure, debugging… everything from basics upwards.
• #define constants and macros, stringizer operator etc.
• Optimising for speed, memory etc.
• Dynamic memory allocation and its pitfalls.
I was a developer for 16 years (Panasonic, Quantel, Nokia, McLaren etc), then went into leadership and management. I still love to sit in front of a page of code and work on it and see it come to life. I’m very familiar with all the joys of coding, and also with the frustrations.
I'm familiar with whole lifecycle from requirements analysis to maintenance in field, so I understand the context in which your SW creations might sit.
Beyond the basics, some areas where I can help are:
• Differences between writing code at school/college and in industry. In industry, your code might be maintained and changed by a dozen developers over the next 10-15 years, and you can write code in a style which means it will keep working the way you want it to.
• Maintaining legacy code - this is very different from “green field” development in that you might inherit 1M lines of somebody else’s code and need to get your head around it, maintain it, debug it.
For 10 years I worked in a very large Defence company and ran the Mentoring scheme, so I’ve arranged lots of mentoring but I’ve also had many mentees and a few mentors myself.
I’m looking forward to talking to people about code and how it works, passing on my advice and learning from you too. I'm an avid supporter of D&I so I enjoy meeting, well, everyone. :-)
Looking forward to working with you.