Software engineering
Full-time development work as part of the apprenticeship — modern tooling, real codebases, production constraints.
Software · Critical Infrastructure · UK
Dan
Smith.
Software engineering degree apprentice working in the UK nuclear sector. Writing code around systems that were running before I was born — and learning how to secure them.
- Role
- Degree apprentice
- Field
- Software eng.
- Sector
- Nuclear / CNI
- Focus
- OT & ICS security
About
I'm on a Digital Technology Solutions degree apprenticeship (software engineering pathway), working full-time on a nuclear site while studying. Day to day that means building software in an environment where legacy industrial control systems — the kind most engineers only read about — are part of the landscape.
That exposure shaped where I'm heading: operational technology and ICS security. Most people learn about critical national infrastructure from a textbook. I walk past it on the way to my desk.
Focus
01 / BUILD
02 / ENVIRONMENT
Legacy OT / ICS
Hands-on proximity to industrial control systems and the realities of running decades-old infrastructure safely.
03 / SECURE
Security fundamentals
Working up from the ground: Linux, networking, and CTF-style problem solving — currently through OverTheWire.
04 / TINKER
Hardware & hobby builds
Raspberry Pi projects and self-hosted experiments. If it has GPIO pins, it's fair game.
Selected project
Pi Voice Assistant
● In progressA self-hosted voice assistant built on a Raspberry Pi 4, with a Pi Zero 2W acting as a satellite wake-word listener. Local speech in, LLM reasoning, local speech out — plus live web search on demand.
OpenWakeWord→Whisper STT→Claude API→Piper TTS [ + Brave Search ]
→ View on GitHub
Currently
- TrainingOverTheWire Bandit — no writeups until it's solved.
- ReadingICS security fundamentals: Modbus, network segmentation, the Purdue model.
- BuildingTool use / function calling for the Pi assistant, so it decides when to search the web itself.
Contact
Open to conversations about software, OT security, or apprenticeships.