I’m Alan Oakden. I live in York, England, I love all things creative, particularly coding and software.

I’ve always had an interest in technology from a young age. I'd been a hobbyist web designer since my teens, but in late 2017 I decided to really push on with my career and study it with the aim of getting a career in software and web development. I temporarily reduced my working hours to four days a week and focused Friday through to Sunday on learning additional web developer skills as well as mobile app development.

Since then, I've gone strength to strength. I landed a role as a sole mobile app developer at Latus Health in 2018, which was a baptism of fire but a successful one where I learned so much in a short space of time. We released a wellbeing app for Outokumpu steelmakers - a €7.7 billion revenue company. I then became a team-lead at one of Manchester's leading agencies Access (now GAIN) in 2019 where we managed large clients such as Edrington (owners of Famous Grouse, Brugal Rum, Macallan Whisky etc), WaterAid and the Welsh Government to name a few. From there, I was asked to rejoin Latus Health in 2021 in order to build my own team to work on a proprietary health solution that entailed - a health dashboard for occ health appointments, data recording and compliance and a wellbeing app that would partially sync with the health dashboard for appointment scheduling while offering online GP, Physio and Counselling services. We also handled an acquisition of an app called 'Reward Me Now' that'd incentivise healthier habits for employees in return for monetary rewards and vouchers off top brands. Since then I've focused on becoming a contractor and building my own business. Most recently I've been doing React and Drupal CMS work for Interactive Investor, revitalising their editor experience with draggable layout paragraphs, and creating a new suite of components in the nextJS frontend that consumes Drupal in a headless manner.

Outside of coding I love anything that can keep me actively engaged. The occasional Netflix series and film is fine, but I much prefer gaming, going for hikes with my dog, playing bass or doing creative work with photography - especially film photography recently. Most recently the arrival of my daughter, Lilly, has been keeping me busy!

I'm currently seeking to be engaged in any project that utilises 'JAMstack' - Javascript, APIs and Markup. My ideal project would include one or more of; React (Gatsby, Next, React Native, Expo etc too), Typescript, Node, GraphQL, Cypress, Docker, Azure / AWS / Firebase and noSQL DBs. I also have experience with various CMS software, especially Drupal.