Tom's journey into coding

Tom has been with Vanquis for 4 and a half years, starting as a Credit Analyst, to his role now as a Profitability Modelling Manager heading up the team that provide the tools and insights to our commercial teams. Have a read of Tom's story about his journey into coding...

Having recently started in a new team, I'm still discovering lots of new and interesting things to learn, and after coding in SAS for 7 years it's exciting to see how we are evolving as a bank with new tools and technologies that will be the future.

After stumbling into starting a degree in Computer Engineering (like many others at 18, I hadn't fully planned out a career path!), I was daunted by the compulsory coding modules and struggled to get excited – partly because they were theory based and all of the data being used was dummy data that had no real meaning or impact.

After university, I started on a graduate scheme for a Consultancy company specialising in SAS (a tool used for data analysis). I had never even heard of SAS before the interview, but I found it fascinating to learn how it was being used on real projects across so many different industries, to solve real business problems.

As a graduate intake we were put through an intensive 2-week classroom based training course to pick up the basics. But looking back, the most effective learning came from working alongside others, sharing and discussing problems and solutions (Yammer is perfect for this!), and trial and error until it started to make sense. Access to online tutorials and resources are great, but nine times out of ten someone has already tackled a similar problem before – so a combination of Google (or indeed Bing) and talking to colleagues will be enough to get you started.

A couple of important things that I learned early on and have stuck with me since. Firstly, there are many different ways to arrive at the same result – when tackling coding or data problems there is not one single solution, everyone will approach it in a slightly different way, so don't feel constrained and approach it how you feel most comfortable. Secondly, when coding for more complex problems, if the next person in the team cannot easily read and interpret your code, then it likely needs simplifying or restructuring, as well as adding comments to explain to others the thinking behind your logic.

Tom's top tips for anyone interested picking up coding...

1. Start using real data (or a small sample) as the results will make so much more sense.
2. Take the time to figure out the basics – once you know the commonly used code you can build on this to solve more complex problems.
3. Break the code down into a number of small steps, and slowly expand to add functionality.
4. Structure the code in a logical and clear layout, so it is simpler to follow.
5. Make use of the wide range of different learning options available to find what works best for you: classroom based, online tutorials, discussion boards, Yammer, lunch & learn sessions, etc.