Brightside Insurance Group was where my professional career began. I joined as a C# Developer during my final year at university - initially as a placement year student, then continuing after graduation. The IT department operated with a technology stack spanning procedural PHP, VB6, and early .NET technologies, supporting integrations with price comparison platforms like GoCompare and Compare the Market.

From day one, I was given real responsibility. Alongside two other university students, I was assigned R&D projects that became genuine business contributions. My university final year project evolved into one of my proudest achievements: a distributed test automation system for QuickTest Professional (QTP). The existing UAT processes took approximately half a day to complete. By building a system that distributed test workloads across multiple test runners in parallel, I reduced execution time to around 30 minutes - limited only by the longest individual test. This was my first experience with distributed systems architecture - what we would now call microservices patterns.

I also proposed a proof of concept to migrate the frontend from PHP to ASP.NET MVC during an innovation day, implementing shared session management via cookie forwarding. While the lead architect ultimately chose a different approach using SQL-based session management, the exercise demonstrated my initiative and architectural thinking early in my career.

Working with the legacy codebase taught me invaluable lessons about technical debt. The core VB6 module responsible for converting quotes to policies was over 40,000 lines long - so large it had hit VB6's file size limit. Adding new functionality meant removing existing code first. The file was entirely procedural with GoTo statements throughout and no sub-functions. I extracted aspects of this code into separate modules - pragmatic band-aids that enabled the business to continue operating while modernisation progressed elsewhere.

This engagement was foundational. Everything from object-oriented design to SOLID principles and design patterns - I learned it here. It transformed me from someone who knew C# syntax into a professional software developer who understood the craft. Every role since has built on these foundations.