What is your background?

 

I’ve lived in England all my life, first in the south and more recently in the north. I enjoyed my education, particularly IT and Physics, and attended Royal Holloway University of London for a degree in Computer Science. Growing up in the countryside, often on or around farmland, inspired my love for the outdoors. My interest in computers began with childhood tinkering and a curiosity about how things worked. At age 12, I downloaded a beginner's guide to Python, which captivated me for a few months, it was all I read!

 

Tell us a bit more about yourself:

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I enjoy the process of problem-solving, of first figuring out what the problem is and how it might be solved, planning a solution, and then enacting that solution and seeing the results. I suppose I found this most keenly with programming and software development, as it poses an unending series of challenges, both big picture and small scale, and a great canvas on which to solve them. Although I often find little software projects for myself in my free time, I spend most of it either playing games, or exploring outside. I love running and hiking, partly for both mental and physical health, but mostly for tranquillity - I tend to find out the quietest trails and paths through the moors and enjoy an hour or two of total peace, day or night, with myself and my dog, Thea.

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How long have you been with Halsys?

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7 years, as of late 2024! I joined a couple of months after graduating from university.

 

What do you enjoy about working with the team?

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Everyone is a joy to work with. We have a great team with a great variety of talents and skills, it often feels like there is no problem we cannot solve in the software space quickly and efficiently, no matter how big it may be or how new to us it is.

 

What is your area of expertise?

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The development team really mix and matches across all the areas of software development, it’s hard to pick a particular area of expertise. I would maybe say the programming itself, just writing the code, is my strength.

 

What’s your favourite feature of MaxLab?

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I want to say the QR workflow, as I did a lot of work to get that going with the rest of the team, alongside the ‘Job’ components in the MaxLab portal to sort out data, testing QR imaging solutions, etc. But I think from a user perspective, my favourite would be the export functionality in MaxLab client. All the options available from image sizes, colour corrections, cropping, resolutions, to building your own data format with whatever image or subject data you want, is very powerful. I can imagine as a lab user I’d love the power of that, and how seamlessly I could integrate it into just about anything.

 

Favourite piece of customer feedback?

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I’m not sure I have a favourite piece of customer feedback. I will say though, as a developer, our instant slack support is so great to see, I imagine with other companies there is a large level of disconnect between the people developing the software and the users using it. At Halsys, we get to read direct from customers when they are happy that we’ve dramatically sped up their work processes, or they’re excited to be using a new feature we’ve developed for them, or they come to us with a new requirement and we already have a feature in the system to solve exactly what they need. The positivity from those messages is very motivating.

 

What's one thing you can't live without?

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I might be a bit cliché and say music. I have playlists for every mood, and spend a good portion of my day with music playing in the background. My ‘Spotify Wrapped’ stats have yet to be matched by friends or family!

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Connect with Max on LinkedIn

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