I'm Ragan
Left school school with ambitions to be a pilot in the RAF and ended up enlisting somehow in the Navy instead as an Aircraft Mechanic.
Quickly found out that the military life wasn't for me and subsequently fell into a new career of software engineering - and haven't looked back since!
I live in a small village to the north of Peterborough with my wife, Hayley and youngest son, Oliver. My eldest son, Bradley, has recently headed off to Hull University to study Computer Science.
I'm a long standing Liverpool FC supporter and enjoy both watching and regularly playing (attempting to at least) in 5 and 7 a side games.
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Starting my career developing new POS systems for Choices Video in Foxpro for DOS and UNIX, I was lucky enough to spend some time in Mombai supporting a third party software company that were helping us deliver the solution.
Funny story - and one thats stuck with me throughout my career (and remember, this was my first engineering gig). Remember, life was much simpler back then - people would head off to the local video shop in the evening and rent a movie for £2.75 for 2 nights and all of the systems in the shops were isolated; unable to communicate with each other with only a small data dump back to head office every few days. Why does this matter - well, this simplistic view and how i used it, taught me a lot about how to approach engineering. We spent 2 years developing a system that would be capable of booking out and returning videos and games (something that was new on the market) including membership management, etc - It went very well and we began rolling it out to shops over the country - proliferated throughout the millions of lines of procedural code that was Foxpro were statements littered with magic ids (1=video, 2=game)... and then came DVDs to our lives. Not only did we need to update the various POS across the country, we needed to add a new format - needless to say, there were some very tough conversations that followed
My next step on my journey was to join Johnston Press, a national publishing company that produced local newspapers and associated backing websites as an engineer and soon moving into a team lead role a few years later; leading their flagship recruitment classifieds site.
This team lead role helped me discover my passion for helping and supporting others in both their personal and professional growth journeys. Since this team lead role, I've worked for a variety of other companies such as comparethemarket, Bauer Media, DisplayLink and Redgate Software - all of whom have helped shape me and are a reason I'm doing what I'm doing today.
