Hello everyone, I'm Will Mann.

I'm a recent graduate (2023) of the flying start programme provided by PwC in partnership with the University of Leeds, completing the Computer Science with Digital Techology Solutions degree.

I've been developing for many years now, and I've come across a variety of projects and technologies which I've been using to hone my passion and increase my skills. If you're interested in seeing what I've worked on, what I learnt from it and if it's still in play today, check out the projects section further down. If you're interested in seeing what technologies I'm currently specialising in, see the techonlogies section, also below.

For my educational years, I spent my time at Wellington College in Crowthorne. There I taught myself many tools of the software development trade, such as Web Development using the latest JS libraries, such as React and previously jQuery. This enabled me to start some project work, such as developing a real time registration system for my boarding house, and leading a team to develop a prep/timetable application using agile development techniques, as part of our student-led learning programme/business WellyCompSci (Wellington College Computer Science).

At Wellington, we are pushing forward with an idea of starting our own technology consulting society, which will be run like a company, where we will train new students (or interns) to build them up to industry level standards while also teaching them the most modern techniques for collaboration in a team, and meeting a deadline. I, the founder and first president of WellyCompSci, have put much time and effort into making this dream a reality, with more information on our website below. I have also completed some work experience for the company Oracle, shadowing one of their developers in their IT Team, to find out how a real tech giant runs as a business.

Now just recently I've finished being a student a the University of Leeds, with a degree apprenticeship sponsored by PwC. However on the summer of 2020, due to the worldwide pandemic, I couldn't attend the PwC summer internship, so I applied for a part time role at FunTech for the summer to become a virtual camp tutor. I also helped out for CoronaUnity, where I did some web development work putting their website together. I'm on the Web Development team, and I still help out where I can.

Throughout my University degree, I had the opportunity to work in a placement year with PwC, allowing me to see how a large scale company can handle the development process. The agile development process, working with other developers, communicating as part of a team and following strict design/implementation standards were just some of the skills I learnt throughout my time on placement. This was also my first introduction to Go, a language developed by Google which I'm happy to say not only am I much more proficient in it, but also I've really fallen for it, due to it's speed, reliability and ease of use.

Now I've graduated with a First Class degree, and over my time at University I've learnt a lot along the way. The highlight of which being I started my own business with two of my friends, called LS6 Events. The idea behind this was to create a unified central feed for all the nightlife and ticketed events throughout Leeds, as at the time of inception there were too many sources. We used this opportunity to teach ourselves new skills and understand new concepts. Progressive web applications, microservices architecture, large language models, recommender systems and more had to be understood. In addition, among my studies, I also honed my existing skills to now specialise in Go, as well as finalising my knowledge NextJS (another specialism), and a new version of the site has allowed me to branch out into VueJS. Overall the whole university experience, both curricularly and extra curricularly has been positive, with the new knowledge developed across this field coming back to help my quality of code, time and again.