Sophie Coyne
I'm a software developer from Liverpool, primarily focusing in Games Programming but also dabbling in other technologies. My passion for all things computers started at a fairly early age in which I supposedly had a habit of attempting to delete import OS files in my youthful naive ignornance.
In terms of formal academic education in relation to software engineering, I took both GCSE and A-Level Computing before going to Glasgow Caledonian University to study Games Development.
Current Employment: Game Engine Developer (Server/Back-end)
Currently I'm employed at a company called "Light and Wonder" (https://www.lnw.com/) which mostly creates web-based reel-slot games. My job at L&W is to program the server-side logic of the games using an internal framework built upon the Spring framework using Java. I have to create the game mechanics and logical evaluation on the server-side and then send the results to the client side to be interpreted visually.
Skill history
Web Development
As the banner below says, I developed this website myself. My journey with learning web development started when I was 11 years old, when my father bought me some books on HTML which inspired me to learn Javascript and CSS as well. At the time the technologies were incredibly counter-intuitive to me (to a degree it still is) but I enjoyed being able to create rudimentary web pages running on free sub-domains.
It wasn't until I had an internship at a software engineering company that my understanding of web development grew exponentially. At Village Software I got to see the structure of various ASP.NET projects and the MVC model that they incorporated.
In my final year of university, I taught myself how to create Node servers in order to create my honours project (being a website which allows one to create serious (educational) games). This insight gave me the experience and confidence to create the website which you are now viewing.
C# Programming
When I was around 15, I got some work experience at Village Software in which, amongst other things, I learned to create Windows Forms .NET programs in C#. After this I continued to create my own Winforms programs at home and continued to advance my prowess (a relative term at that age).
My C# studies become more official when I began university at age 18 (2016) and started to learn how to write scripts for the Unity engine.
C++ Programming
After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to understand C++ at the age of 14, I didn't truly begin to use it until my second year of university in which one of my modules required creating a game using the SDL2 graphics and audio libraries.
Further down the line in my university course, modules required using the openGL framework in order to render 3D graphics, this is when I learned to incorporate GLSL shaders and develop my understanding of how matrices are manipulated mathematically by those shaders.
Python Programming
During the course of taking GCSE Computing it became necessary to learn Python to create basic programs as the basis of my coursework. However, I also incorporated Python into my studies at the time by creating revision quizzes (which in hindsight probably distracted me from revision if anything, but I digress).
Admittedly I haven't much use for Python regularly, however I still find it to be a pleasant and robust language and I will break it out on occasion in order to quickly prototype algorithms. An example would be using Python for my Advent of Code solutions.
Games Development
My games development experience began when I started studying Computer Games (Software Development) at Glasgow Caledonian University. At first this just meant programming in C# for the Unity game engine.