I'm Eamon Keane. I live in Galway in the West of Ireland and grew up in a small village called Maum in Connemara.

Eamon Keane looking out over Maum valley from the top of Log na Brice Mountain
View from the top of Log na Brice mountain in Maum.

My family have a sheep farm. We breed Connemara / Mayo blackface sheep. When I'm home I get to help out in any way I can. It's a great way to get away from the computer screen for an extended period. The land isn't flat, so it doubles as a good form of exercise too :)

Sheep going out to pasture after being scanned for lambs
Some of the ewes going back to the hill after their scan in 2019.
Eamon Keane shearing sheep in Maam
Shearing the sheep

To keep fit I play some 5 a side soccer, tag rugby and touch rugby. Highlight of the year has to be Europe's biggest tag rugby festival Pig N' Porter.

Pig N' Porter Festival Limerick 2018
Pig N' Porter Plate winners 2018 :D

Getting into Software Development

I completed my primary degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Galway, Ireland in 2012. I then went on to work in Medtronic that year starting out as an associate R&D Engineer.

Medtronic's Customer Innovation Centre in Parkmore Galway
Medtronic's Customer Innovation Centre in Parkmore, Galway

I worked in Medtronic for 5 years. I met some truly incredible people there.

My first year of engineering was undenominated. This meant I got to get a taste of the basics of a few different engineering disciplines. I sampled Mechanical, Civil, Biomedical, Mechanical, Electric along with Electronic and Computer engineering (First languages I worked with were Fortran and C++)

I had to make a decision at the end of first year and decided on Mechanical Engineering. It was between that and Electronic and Computer Engineering.

Making the Switch

In 2017 I decided to pursue Software development.  The seeds were planted in 2012 and I needed to know if it was something I would really enjoy.  I asked Medtronic to take a year out to complete a conversion course. They supported me in doing so.

I completed the Higher Diploma in Software Design and Development in NUIG (Industry Stream) and graduated in 2018. It is a fantastic course. As part of the course I got an internship with Storm Technology Ltd. and I've been working there since.

My gut feeling was correct, I truly enjoy creating software.

Working at Storm Technology

dark room with two pc monitors showing a code editor in the background.

I've been working with Storm Technology since June of 2018. My first few months consisted of some cross-platform mobile development using Xamarin.

Since then I've been working as a full stack developer using Angular, .NET Core, Entity Framework Core and SQL Server in the main. As the company is relatively small I also get to work in the DevOps side of the house ; setting up environments and resources in Azure, CI/CD pipelines, Server Analytics etc. Along with that I've used Azure Service Bus for messaging queues, Logic Apps, Azure Functions and some Power Automate for building simple Apps. I know enough about Power BI to be dangerous.

Why write a blog?

I want a way to document my learning and share it with whomever is interested. Over the past two years developing software many blogs have helped me out in getting through some tricky challenges. This blog allows me to pay it forward.
I find that I'm learning something new nearly every day. If I can help one other person out there then it's worth it to me.

Contact me

You can reach out to me using the Contact page. Alternatively you'll find me on Twitter @eamokeane or LinkedIn .