In this video I share a pretty big life update: I quit Cisco and joined a startup. And yes—Cisco is a prestigious company, globally respected, and I genuinely owe a lot of my success to it. I talk about how I got into the Cisco International Internship Program during university, got flown out to San Jose (Silicon Valley), had my accommodation covered, and got paid while working full-time. That experience helped my engineering career absolutely flourish, and later I came back to the UK, worked part-time with the same team, did my dissertation with Cisco, and eventually led the UI efforts for internal QA dashboards as a full-time front-end developer. But over time, things changed—org structure, management, people leaving—and suddenly my responsibilities shifted in a way that didn’t match who I am as a creative developer. I started getting tasks outside the spectrum of what I should be doing (a creative dev shouldn’t have to live in spreadsheets), and I felt like my creative mind was being boxed in. So I opened myself up on LinkedIn, looked for something that would let me make a bigger impact, and landed a developer advocate role at Permit.io—because I actually loved the product and the team. My takeaway: if you need change and you know it’s the right move, don’t be scared to make that first step. Especially as a developer, you want opportunities that make you excited to show up every day—and that’s exactly where I am now.