Hannah came to us with a degree in neuroscience, and an ambition to become a developer. She’d been learning to code alongside completing a course which is within one scalpel of being actual brain surgery. She started self-taught, with a short internship with us last year, and we were really pleased when she asked us to mentor her, and delighted when she accepted our job offer a few months later. She’s quickly become a core part of our Python development team. When she started full time, we threw her straight into a complex project: a custom user interface for multiple back-end services, and she thrived. She came in for the last month of our project to produce https://www.ncvo.org.uk/ and integrate it into NCVO’s back end systems. That means she started on the gnarly problems. Not the broad-brush of getting a design in place, but bugs which only showed in one environment, or one one browser. The last 20% problems. The ones that are the hardest. She’s simply got stuck into an extremely complex codebase, with many moving parts, and made things work. We’re incredibly impressed by her intelligence, positive attitude and ability to learn, but what really stands out is her fearlessness and tenacity. She’ll take on a complex problem, and crack it, time and time again. Not only that, but she’s just now been standing in for one of our seniors while they’re on holiday, not just sitting in on meetings but handling issues the customer raises with grace and good humour. She’s basically brilliant to have around.