Josh sat down with Ryan to talk through his journey from the wee computer guy fixing the school projector to co-founding an AI advisory business, and how a career in software engineering shaped the way he now thinks about the biggest question in the industry.

What stands out about Ryan's story is that the through-line was never really the code. It was the problem solving. From jailbreaking his iPod as a kid to building a Where's Wally clone in Visual Basic at school, the instinct was always the same. He got exposed to programming in fourth year of high school, fell in love with it, and never looked back.

From there it built brick by brick. A placement year at BT that meant driving down to Ipswich in a beat up car for the assessment centre and living alone in a studio flat at twenty. Four and a half years at a startup where he was thrust into cloud infrastructure and told to make it happen. Then the audit world, and eventually founding Adastra with his co-founder Dan a few months ago.

The heart of the conversation is a claim worth sitting with. A developer's job was never to write code. It was to solve a problem. It just so happened you had to write the code by hand to do it. Ryan makes the case that AI does not threaten that job, it sharpens it, and he reaches for the tractor and the arrival of animation software to explain why the fear of a new tool rarely matches what happens next.

He is candid about the gap he sees in businesses right now. Everyone feels like an expert engineer overnight, but few understand the security, the scalability, or how to verify the thing actually works. His advice to students is the same thing he has said for years. Go build something, deploy it to the cloud, put it out in the world, because barely anyone can claim that and it is the real differentiator.

The conversation also gets into why "we must use AI" is the wrong place for any business to start, why the younger generation's lack of preconceived ideas may be their biggest advantage, and why becoming literate in AI is the vocabulary of the future.

If you are a student wondering how to stand out, a graduate weighing up the job market, or an engineering director trying to build an AI strategy, this is an honest conversation about solving problems and building a career without waiting to be picked.

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Applications open in weeks. The people who get the internships, placements and graduate roles are the ones who are ready before they do.In the last of four episodes for the new academic year, Josh shares what he'd tell any engineering student or graduate going after a jobTreat getting the job like a module and give it time every week. Build a base CV and tailor it to every role. Get in early, because some companies hire as applications come in and close when they're full. Josh is honest about a process he thinks is flawed: early-career recruitment is problematic, and it pushes too many good students to the back of the queue. He can't get you a job. But he can help you build towards one and these are the steps he'd take.Ready. Steady. Go.

The simplest habit in this episode is the one you'll wish you'd started sooner.Sixteen years ago, in his first job, Josh was told to keep a notepad. He still does over 25 of them now, filled with notes from across his career. When it came to becoming a chartered engineer, those notebooks were the record he built his whole submission from.This episode is about starting yours. Not a tidy diary, a working log. Josh walks through the rhythm he'd tell any engineering student or graduate to build now, before the new academic yearWhy writing it down matters more than where. Why keeping the record is the thing, not the tool.Why this one habit sits underneath everything that comes later, your applications, your interviews, your chartership years down the line.Recorded at the University of Strathclyde.Part of a four-episode series for the new academic year: Reflect (60) · Recognise (61) · Record (62) · Apply (63).—Follow Engineer a Career on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok, and come along to our events across Scotland this academic year.