I'm Ross Fairgrieve. You probably guessed that.
I currently work as
a cameraperson and video editor, based in Reading. I've had the
pleasure of working for all sorts of organisations, many of whom do
some really important work.
Now, however, I'm ready for a new challenge. I want to combine my creativity
with my natural nerdyness, to create tools that make
the world a little bit better than it was before.
I recently took myself back to university, studying a master's degree
in Environmental Technology at Imperial College London. While trying to
build a MATLAB model to help Tanzanian farmers get drought insurance,
I fell in love with software as a means for making the world a better place.
In the Founders and Coders course, I see an opportunity to not only learn
web development, but also to join a community of people who want to use
technology for more than just adding zeros to a bottom line.
As your nan always said (probably), if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing properly.
I graduated with the highest mark in my year in both my undergraduate degree
and my master's degree and I plan on bringing this same level of effort and
enthusiasm to Founders and Coders.
I'm a huge proponent of collaborative learning. I believe that,
by helping other people learn, you gain a better level of understanding
yourself. And when I inevitably get stuck, I really appreciate the helping hand!
I'd love to find a job building tools that have a positive social and/or
environmental impact; something that will also keep pushing me to learn and improve.
I'd also really like to get involved with future Founders and Coders cohorts,
both to pay forward the time and effort invested in me and
to keep meeting great people who are looking to use coding to make a difference.
I was born.
To be honest, I didn't have a huge amount of
input into this so I can't really take any credit. I was also so
ugly that I think my mum was tempted to put me back.
My memory of this time is a little hazy. I'm reliably informed that I used it wisely though, learning to walk, talk and use a toilet. This all proved to be a great idea as, by a happy coincidence, I'd end up using all of these skills regularly in later life.
I spent most of this period pretending (knowing) that I was Batman. The rest of the time was spent jumping off things and avoiding, at all costs, the incomparable shame that comes with accidentally calling the teacher "Mum".
I went to secondary school, where I expanded my previous skill set – largely consisting of eating play-doh and doing colouring in – to include things like maths, physics, english and geography (or "colouring in" as it's also known). I also once tried to jump over a metal railing and put one of the spikes through my leg. At this point, I realised that I might not be Batman.
A love of the outdoors, and particularly the oceans, led me to take a year out of education to train as a PADI scuba diving instructor. I started my training in the tropical waters of the Gulf of Thailand and finished it off in a quarry near Heathrow Airport.
A love of quarries near Heathrow Airport led me to study a degree in oceanography at the University of Southampton, specialising in the maths and physics of the sea. I really enjoyed the technical and analytical nature of the subject and I graduated with a first class honours degree and the highest mark on the course.
It turns out that graduating at the peak of the worst financial
crisis since the Great Depression makes it a little bit tricky to
get employed. I took a temporary, any-port-in-a-storm job, making cups of tea
and photocopying things at a forensic accounting company.
This job
took a turn for the odd when the only person in the company who was
capable of running the bespoke software that found financial anomalies,
disappeared...with the software. My boss asked me if I fancied having a go at writing
new scripts so that the business could actualy still function. Despite
the small matter of having next to no programming experience, I took
him up on the challenge. Two weeks later, we had new testing algorithms
that were much faster and more thorough than the original ones and,
nine months later, I was made the head of the largest department in
the business.
What was supposed to be a three-month contract to save up for some travelling,
had turned into two years of happy number-crunching. I never intended
to end up working in the financial sector, however, and I did eventually leave to
see a bit more of the world and to find out how I might be able to use
my career to do something that I considered to be a bit more important.
While I was away, I used a hobby of mine
– making videos – to help promote the work of a couple of charities.
When I saw the positive impact that these efforts had, I realised that
videos could be used, not just for watching cats falling off things
and then pretending that they meant to fall off things,
but also to make a real difference in the world.
I've been working as a freelance film-maker since 2011 and have
had the pleasure of working for a huge range of organisations from
the University of Oxford and the National Oceanography Centre, to
the Institute for Cancer Research and Prostate Cancer UK. Many
of my clients are doing really groundbreaking work and it's
been a great priviledge to witness this first-hand while helping,
in some small way, to promote their endeavours.
Others aren't doing groundbreaking work. They're just making crisps.
Towards the end of 2015, I decided to more closely focus my filming
on the sector that I've had a long-standing passion for: the environment
and technology. I wanted to improve my own knowledge and so I took myself back to university, studying a
master's degree in the appropriately titled environmental technology, at Imperial College London.
While studying, I re-discovered my love of technical work,
and particularly programming. I taught myself to code in MATLAB
and, for my thesis, produced a tool to enable the provision of low-cost
drought insurance for previously uninsurable smallhold farmers in Tanzania.
The thesis got a mark of 92%, the highest that my supervisor
had ever awarded. I also graduated with the highest overall mark out of the 150
students on the MSc and was awarded the Aecom Prize for Outstanding
Performance.
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While I still believe in the importance of video as a means of
communication, studying my
master's degree made me realise both how much I enjoy coding
and how much better suited I am to coding than video production.
I believe that web development could be a perfect mixture of the technical
programming that I enjoy so much, and the creativity and lateral thinking that my current
job allows me to exercise.
Since graduating just under a year ago, I've continued to work in
video production and I've now saved enough money to cover my financial
commitments (Batmobile insurance etc.)
while I train to become a web developer. If you'll have me,
I'm ready!
I'd love to be a part of Founders and Coders. I have no interest in
expending blood sweat and tears to become the best web developer that I can, only to sell my soul to a bank. It's
Founders and Coders' emphasis on giving people the skills to create software
that makes the world a better place, that has me hooked.
I'm also really attracted to the collaborative, collective approach
that Founders and Coders takes. I'd love the opportunity to be a part
of a community that's dedicated to helping each other and using our
newly-developed skills to make a real difference.
Below, you'll find links to the pages required in support of this application, including
the GitHub repo for this page, and my profiles on freeCodeCamp and CodeWars.
I'd be really grateful if you'd consider my application and I look forward to hearing from you.
I believe that I was meant to be a web developer. My parents actually named
me after the very well-known bug discovered in the early days of the internet, whereby typing 'ross'
when viewing a web page would inexplicably trigger random lines from 'Solid' by 80s soul
duo Ashford and Simpson – a bug that I understand hasn't been entirely eradicated even to this day.
