Red Mars Digital

About

Hello!

I'm Robin Marsden, a full stack developer based in London, UK.

Following a 15-year career in HR, payroll and finance, I made the switch to concentrate on building a career in web design and development in early 2017.

Scroll on to see some of my education and career milestones so far.

For a full CV, please feel free to contact me.

1980

Born in Chester, to a family of zookeepers.

1993

Assembled my first PC from components: an i386 with 2 whole megabytes of RAM.

1998

Graduated with 4 grade A A-levels from Lancaster Royal Grammar School.

1998 - 2001

Completed a 2:1 BSc in Zoology at the University of Nottingham, creating a science education website as my final year project.

2002 - 2007

Several roles over 6 years with Protocol National in Nottingham, primarily as Payroll Supervisor and BACS signatory for the wages of around 7,000 part-time and interim teaching staff.

2007 - 2008

Various short-term finance, payroll and HR contracts:

  • Glyndebourne Opera House
  • Roedean School
  • Select Appointments
2008 - 2010

Payroll Manager at Icon Live, leading a team of 5 and responsible for the wages of ~2,000 part and full-time employees.

2009 - 2011

Completed a number of physics and astrophysics modules with the Open University, fitting my studies around full-time employment.

2011 - 2017

Senior Reward Manager at Sony Music UK.

MySQL

A broad remit with responsibility for UK payroll, pensions and employee benefits, as well as acting as sysadmin for HR, payroll and reward software - and as the principal MySQL and SAP Business Objects database administrator and MI report builder.

Spring 2017

As a first step to changing career to focus on tech and programming, I refreshed my web development skills from first principles using Udemy's Web Developer Bootcamp.

Across 297 video tutorials, this well-regarded course comprehensively covered the fundamentals of front-end development, from the foundations - HTML, CSS and Javascript - through to popular libraries including jQuery and Bootstrap.

On the back-end, the course focused on the Node runtime and the Express framework, backed with mongoDB NoSQL database architecture.

HTML5
Javascript
jQuery
CSS3
Bootstrap
Node.js
Express
MongoDB
2017

The first Red Mars Digital projects were comissioned later in 2017, including two touchscreen installation pieces for a zoo / visitor's centre in Cumbria and a photography portfolio site. You can read more about all of these on the Projects page.

2018

In February 2018 I began working at Royal Museums Greenwich as their Digital Media Developer, designing and creating all manner of (hopefully!) entertaining and educational interactive visitor-facing digital content across the museums' four famous sites: the National Maritime Museum, Royal Observatory Greenwich, Cutty Sark and Queen's House.

So far I have produced a number of digital interactives now installed in permanent galleries, including in the Maritime Museum's brand new 'Endeavour' wing that opened in September. I have also created several installations for temporary exhibitions, including the fantastic Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition 2018.

HTML5
Javascript
jQuery
CSS3
Node.js
Ubuntu
Apache
Python
2019

In January 2019 I moved across London from one famous cultural institution to another, joining the Digital Media and Marketing team at the Natural History Museum.

My role here is in many ways the polar opposite of RMG, working in a large department on high-traffic online applications such as the museum's popular (and vast) website, as opposed to a lone developer producing single-instance kiosks for installation into on-site galleries. This change has brought invaluable experience of teamwork in a digital context, practicing whole new ways of working in an agile environment. It has also brought the opportunity to work alongside dedicated UX and design professionals and in-house producers of great content such as video - not to mention many other fellow developers!

On the technical side, the hugely varied codebase has brought fantastic exposure to and the chance to learn all kinds of languages, frameworks and new workflow tools - including (but definitely not limited to):

React
Vue / Nuxt
Webpack
Grunt
Sourcetree
GitLab
Trello
Adobe Experience Manager

© Red Mars Digital 2017