We ask Thomas about his career to date, work-life balance and his role as a Senior Developer.
I work alongside the rest of the Tech Team to build, maintain & fix any web applications that require my attention. I also help with any support and guidance of our clients or other members of the team need.
I’ve worked on several successful projects, however, the one that stands out the most is at a previous role in another company – building our own CMS from scratch, this was before the likes of WordPress making our lives easier. The CMS was being used to power approximately 30 or so different sites and performed well over a long duration.
A fully charged Macbook – and that’s it. Thankfully in this industry, you can get by with just that.
Thanks to the abundance of reading material and access to the experiences/opinions of other developers via things like Stack Overflow, problems tend to be solved quite quickly. In a previous role I worked with a lot of APIs for couriers and shipping carriers – all built in extremely different ways and with (usually) incomplete or out of date documentation, integration with these systems could prove frustrating.
In my own time, I built a website and API (in Laravel) for use by a golf society I am a member of. On top of this, I decided to teach myself the programming language Swift so that I could build an iPhone app that would consume my API and allow members of the society to live-track and score themselves during rounds of golf.
I do my best to set a hard divide between my work and leisure time. The nature of the kind of work we do means that we sometimes need to be on hand outside of normal office hours but I’m lucky to work for a company that appreciates the distinction between the two. After injuries from football and marathon training caught up with me I now play a lot of golf and am slowly trying to get back into cycling.
The majority of my roles for the last decade have involved PHP & Javascript, so I would have to say those. I’ve worked with many PHP frameworks over the years (Zend, CodeIgniter, Yii, along with platforms such as Magento, Zen Cart, OS Commerce & WordPress). Laravel is very much my favourite.
I’ve enjoyed learning Swift in my own time, next up will be React Native which looks great too.
