Cameron Bishop

As a calm and dedicated individual, I am eager to take the next step in my career in the tech industry. I’ve spent the last 2 years in Education and Hospitality across many roles but I’m ready to make the change. I find programming to be a very rewarding skill, utilising my problem-solving and critical thinking skills to make something new appear on a page is invigorating & I’m excited to develop this knowledge further.

Projects

Name	Description	Tech/tools	Website link
Battle Tetris	2-player tetris played on the same grid	Javascript, Jest, CSS, HTML5	https://michael-szczepanski.itch.io/battle-tetris
Acebook	A social media web app that lets you chat with friends in the same vain as classic FaceBook	React, Express, Node.js, Mongoose	https://acebook-airbenders-frontend.onrender.com/login
Bank Tech Tests	Made a pseudo bank account using a multiclass codebase	Javascript, Jest	https://github.com/camybish/Solo_Challenges
Bowling Score Card	A scorecard for Ten Pin Bowling	Ruby, RSpec	https://github.com/camybish/bowling-challenge-ruby

Work Experience

Pier Pressure, Brighton BN1 (Oct' 22 to Date)
Games Host

• Engaged guests in immersive experiences by adopting character roles and introducing them to the escape room concept
• Provided valuable guidance and hints to players, ensuring a successful and enjoyable experience
• Strengthened presentation skills and enhanced ability to prioritise and focus on overall objectives rather than specific details

Engage Education, Brighton BN1 (Agency Full-time) (Nov’ 21 to Mar' 23)
Teaching Assistant

• Delivered targeted interventions, ensuring effective engagement and participation from students aged 2 to 16 with various learning difficulties and behavioural challenges in educational environments across Sussex
• Fostered a supportive learning environment, encouraging active involvement and academic progress for individual students and groups
• Collaborated closely with teachers and parents, adapting teaching strategies and materials to meet the specific needs and goals of each student
• Maintained accurate records of student progress and communicated effectively with stakeholders to ensure cohesive support for optimal educational outcomes
• Built new skills around:
  • Emotional Support
  • Recontextualising problems in a simpler-to-understand way
  • Helping children keep pace in what can be, for them, an incredibly fast-paced learning environment
  • Being observant of any extra difficulties they may be having that aren't already documented

Peacocks Ltd (May 19 to Mar' 21)
Sales Assistant

• Provided exceptional customer service by operating the tills and ensuring a seamless checkout experience
• Successfully handled various customer inquiries and transactions, ensuring their satisfaction
• Efficiently managed inventory by unpacking, tagging, and presenting merchandise on the shop floor

Fox in a Box, Dalston E8 (May 19 to Aug' 19) Games Master

• Spearheaded game testing, and orchestrated a successful launch of this branch. This work involved tweaking the user experience by making sound effects for the room intros and working with management to find the best level of intensity for the escape room experience.
• Prioritized customer experiences, embracing both successes and setbacks

Lee McCormack Design (Aug' 18 to Jun' 19)
Intern

• During my 25-week work placement at Lee McCormack Design, I acquired practical design skills while working on a new product.
• My responsibilities included conducting market research for e-sports, presenting concepts and products to clients, creating app wireframes, and storyboarding.

Skills

IT Skills - Gained from my Degree

• Proficient in SolidWorks, Photoshop, Illustrator, SketchUp, and Marvel plus a basic understanding of Proteus (circuitry design software). I am also a highly competent user of Microsoft Office products. In terms of computer programming, I'm practised in:

• Ruby, RSpec & Sinatra (example shown here https://wills-test-on-the-web.onrender.com/ )

• JavaScript & Jest

• Mongoose, Express, React & Node.js

• TDD, Agile Development + Git & GitHub

Communication

At Makers Academy, I took part in presenting each of the 3 group projects. This involved describing the development process, summarising the challenges, and highlighting the functionality of the product. This would include providing product demos to peers and the training team. My communication skills regarding the work I did, came into effect in my process of understanding the coding concepts that we made our way through. With plenty of pair programming and a fair few projects of practice, I can relay at different levels of technical knowledge, what is happening in my code with a good level of transparency. This built on my communication skills from my work at Pier Pressure. Each shift provided a new way to hone in my introduction and process throughout the game to give players the best experience possible, whether that be by perfecting my presentation abilities in the introduction speech or providing clues that provided a good challenge for players that still fit the room's theme.

Team Player

I feel that my time at Makers Academy was a fantastic showcase of how well I can work in a team environment: the best example being my final project, Battle Tetris. I took charge of the initial ideation session, steering the group to focus on the minimum viable product and leaving the big ideas for afterwards. The sprint planning was difficult as we were familiar with the technology but not how to make a game, as a result of this once the MVP was made, we needed to evaluate the features that could be implemented within the remaining timeframe. Since I had been working on more technical tickets for the MVP, I gave my insight as to what features were possible to include. A big feature to differentiate this from classic Tetris was a selection of power-ups that the player could use whenever. After deliberation, we came to a solution that still used power-ups but ones that were activated after certain points in the game.

Creativity

In my final project at Makers, Battle Tetris, it was invigorating to utilise the skills I developed from my degree in product design. A big focus of the degree and this final project was taking an idea from a simple sketch to a fully-fledged prototype. There were a lot of similarities between the two and the project was a refreshingly creative one at that. We went through an iterative process to first come up with the idea for Battle Tetris, something that felt achievable within the two weeks allotted. One major obstacle to creating this Tetris game was making sure the pieces could rotate and that was a challenge that I fully embraced. I figured out an algorithm that would change the respective coordinates and after 2 refactorings, I made a scalable solution that made later revisions and additions a lot easier. It was a great blend of my mathematical ability and creative problem-solving.

Education

Makers Academy (Jan' 23 to Date)

• Makers Academy provides an intensive course to provide you with the skills to become a junior developer with Full Stack experience

• Throughout the course, we did plenty of practice exercises independently and through pair programming which you can peruse on my GitHub account

• Improving my resolve was probably one of the biggest personal skills I got to develop. Coding can sometimes feel overwhelming but when working as a team and using the right resources can get you consistently improving and progressing in ways that surprise yourself

• Within that time we frequently used pairing to problem solve efficiently, requiring teamwork and communication. Thanks to the frequency of this, it got me more comfortable in asking my peers for help with concepts I didn't quite understand. I'm sure coding as a skill is something that you continually improve your understanding of, so I appreciate Makers for giving me the space to improve on this and plenty of other working methods. The Pomodoro work schedule helped a fair deal as well, giving us frequent breaks that kept us fresh and ready for the hefty tasks we were undertaking.

• We used:

  • Ruby and RSpec to get us started and accustomed to TDD, then building on this with PostgreSQL and Sinatra to build websites with their own databases
  • After gaining confidence with these programs, we moved on to JavaScript and Jest to make the most of the more complex web scenarios that JavaScript works wonders with. These included making algorithms that utilized APIs and using DOM elements.
  • This led us into using the MERN stack (Mongoose, Express, React, Node.js + Cypress) to create a Facebook clone website and finally JS, HTML & CSS for a web game for a fairly technical Tetris game.

• Throughout the Sinatra web app, the Facebook clone, and the final project, Battle Tetris, we realised as a cohort and within our respective teams, how important communication and planning are when bringing something like this together. Utilising an Agile working environment with short sprints, setting out a team charter before starting, and working within the tickets of each sprint: these were processes that our cohort worked to continually improve, and the more we did, the happier we were with the results.

• Two major processes we needed to better understand for these projects to be successful were effective tickets made with Agile Development and working collaboratively with Git repositories. The former presented challenges with the AirBnB clone (first project). Some tickets took multiple days to complete and we found that more planning prior and making 'bite-sized' tickets achieved a smoother workflow. We learnt a thing or two about git repositories as well. That any branch with a pull request into 'main' needs to be reviewed on other local machines; to check features & any issues as well as tests and test coverage.

BSc Product Design - Bournemouth University (Sept ‘16 - July ‘21)

• My degree course is professionally accredited by the Institution of Engineering Designers (IED) and fulfils requirements for Chartered Technological Product Designer (CTPD).
• Throughout my degree, I have covered a range of topics from material technologies to sustainability issues. Using computer aided design and analysis simulation tools along with engineering drawings producing my own unique products in the workshop studio.
• My dissertation project was a great encapsulation of my creative spirit and lead me to create a toy for toddlers that worked at building communication and imaginative real-world play.
• This came in the form of a toy that blended the timeless creativity of wooden trainsets and dollhouses. You can see this in detail on my Product Design portfolio linked here: https://cameronjamesbishop.wixsite.com/home

Any other qualifications

• CPD Level 2 Teaching Assistant - Higher Distinction
• JSLA – Distinction
• B-Tech – IT – Distinction
• Piano & Music Theory up to and including Grade 5

Hobbies

• Bouldering

  • Bouldering is a puzzle. How do you take full advantage of the wall in front of you to get to the top? Learning how to make the most of complicated holes and trusting your abilities to take steps you didn't think you could

• Journaling

  • Journaling as well as some other forms of writing have helped me to continually develop my communication skills and have helped give me the interesting writing challenge of making the mundane moments exciting to read about.