I'd spent around six and a half years building a career as a web engineer at my previous company, so it was a completely unexpected connection that led me to decide to move to MI-6. A classmate of mine from high school had already joined the company and, knowing I worked as a web engineer, got in touch to see if I'd be interested. I didn't have any real complaints about my old job, but I did feel it might be time for a change, so I figured I'd at least hear what they had to say.

I'd had no connection at all to the field of MI before that, but I was drawn to the task of optimising the data collected within miHub® — MI-6's service — to make it easier to analyse. I'd enjoyed competitive programming as a hobby since my student days, and loved using algorithms and data structures to find efficient ways of processing data. I felt that kind of experience and way of thinking could really be put to good use at MI-6.

Since joining, I've been working on back-end development for a major update to miHub®. This update greatly expands the range of R&D work miHub® can cover, bringing the value of MI to even more clients.

One of the biggest challenges in using MI is that raw data straight from the lab floor isn't easy to work with as it is. Until now, that raw data has had to be converted by hand into a form suitable for machine learning. This update aims to ease that conversion burden, lower the barrier to using MI, and drive wider adoption.

In the work I'm doing at the moment, the real test of skill is how simply and clearly I can implement a complex system. I really feel I've been trusted with crucial parts of it — things like core database design and architecture decisions — and compared to my last job, the challenges I get to tackle are far more interesting.

Everyone on the web engineering team is eager to learn about unfamiliar subjects, and they're a constant source of inspiration to me. Alongside our internal Slack, we also use MetaLife (a virtual office tool where team members interact through avatars) during work hours, and whenever there's something I don't understand, I can go and ask a colleague inside MetaLife. It feels like a clubroom or lab where everyone gathers, and even though we work fully remotely, communication never feels like a struggle.

What I like about MI-6 is that colleagues respect one another while still being able to properly say what they think. Even in code reviews (where source code is checked by team members other than the person who wrote it), I'm the type who likes to point out even small things that concern me. But when I say something like 'this code isn't very efficient' or 'this looks likely to cause a bug', the other person comes back with their own thinking too, and we end up having a constructive discussion. I think that shows everyone has confidence in the skills they've each built up, without ever losing their eagerness to keep learning.

Going forward, miHub® will keep gaining new features and evolving further as a SaaS product, and I'll continue supporting that implementation from the back end. Our role is to support researchers' decision-making with a service that's both robust and highly scalable. If we chase down everything we'd eventually like to achieve, the ideas just keep expanding with no real end in sight — but even so, I want to keep a clear focus on what needs doing right now, and steadily build up the product's value, one step at a time.