Roger Hughes

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Roger, Senior Full Stack Engineer for Sign In Solutions. Sign In Solutions is a visitor management platform, and I work across the full stack building features and maintaining our systems.

I’m also part of an internal ‘AI Champions’ team, which involves running team meetings and one-to-one sessions helping other developers introduce AI tools into their workflow.

What first got you into tech?

I’ve always wanted to know how things work. As a child, I’d take toys apart to see what was inside and build small electronics projects. My first website came at school aged about 15, built using nothing more than Notepad. Just raw HTML. There was something magical about writing text in a file and seeing it come to life in a browser. That sense of creating something from nothing has stayed with me ever since.

What does your typical working day look like?

My day starts with a stand-up meeting, then coffee - essential! The rest is usually a mixture of development work and code review. I value the code review process; it’s not just about catching bugs, but sharing knowledge and maintaining consistency. As part of the AI Champions team, I have regular sessions with developers across the company. Helping someone discover how AI tools can speed up their workflow is really rewarding. It’s exciting to see how quickly AI-assisted development is becoming part of our everyday toolkit.

What’s your setup? Software and hardware. Pictures welcomed!

For work, I use a MacBook Pro. I have a MacBook Air for personal projects - it’s nice to keep things separate. I’ve also got a desktop PC for occasional gaming and machine learning experiments. Having access to a proper GPU when you want to train models makes a real difference.

I also just picked up a Switch 2 for chilling out in the evenings.

What’s the last piece of work you feel proud of?

To learn about AI, I built a website that scraped trading card data from eBay and other sources. The most challenging part was implementing image recognition that could identify a specific trading card from a photo out of a database of 35,000 cards.

The system showed current and historical pricing for that card across various regions and currencies. Unfortunately, scraping has become more difficult recently with sites implementing anti-bot measures, so I’ve taken it down while I think about a refactor and relaunch.

It was an incredible learning experience, covering web scraping, data processing, computer vision, and building a user-friendly interface.

What’s one thing about your profession you wish more people knew?

Technology moves so fast it’s like a new job every few years, even when you stay with the same company. The frameworks, tools, and best practices are constantly evolving. You have to roll with the changes, be open to learning and experimenting. You need to be comfortable feeling like a beginner again. Some people find this exhausting, but I find it exciting - there’s always something new to explore.

Share with others something worth checking out. Not necessarily tech related. Shameless plugs welcomed.

The NN1 Discord server! Come and collaborate - we’re stronger when we work together. It’s a great community for asking questions, sharing knowledge, or just chatting about tech. Having that local connection makes a real difference when you’re working remotely.