Meet the Team: Si and The Dev Department

Meet Si

How long have you been at Dock?

11 years

What’s been a highlight of your time here?

Although a few years ago now, I really enjoyed our team trip to Copenhagen - there is now a running joke about those who joined just a little too late to go on the trip, they know who they are!

Also a couple of conference trips to Barcelona and Amsterdam, it’s great to get out of the studio and mix with like minded people.

What skills have you developed since joining Dock?

Honing my problem solving skills - although working with different coding languages requires practice and it's a skill you have to develop, you can’t effectively use those skills if you’re not solving the right problem.

What skills do people assume you need but rarely use?

You might spend a full day investigating an issue and only write one line of code to fix the problem.

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The team at a glance

Department: Development

Team size: 4

Roles in the team: Front-end and Back-end Developers

Who do you work closest with internally?

I work closely with the whole team; liaising with Project Managers on what needs to be prioritised, and integrating scripts from Google, Meta or Bing, and creating event based data to send to third party services with the Marketing team.

I also collaborate with the design team to make UX decisions and see what is and isn't possible with code.

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What do you do daily?

Most of my day is spent working tools such as PHPStorm for file edits and the terminal for command line tools, which are needed for development, such as frontend build tools, interaction with servers and saving/pushing files to our Git repository.

When I first got into development, I started working with a Magento site, and because of the lack of Magento developers, I found it easier over the years to find work specialising in the websites. You definitely need a certain level of patience to work with Magento and as they do things differently to most frameworks, (a lot less of a modern approach to others) it can make development time slow. 

However the skills you pick up are transferable to many different development platforms, meaning I can jump into platforms like Laravel and Wordpress, no problem. Every website uses HTML, Javascript and CSS - these are fundamentals, which I will interact with across all our clients, regardless of which platform they’re on. 

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How the Team Works

How do you usually share work or responsibilities?

I believe the success of our team at the moment is down to recognising everyone's skill set and delegating the right tasks to the right person. Each one of us has a slightly different approach to working on tasks, as development setups vary from developer to developer. 

I find it best not to standardise development tools as some developers might find some tools unproductive; some might find working with Git in a GUI more productive then through the command line. Also experience and skill level plays a huge role in how a developer will approach a task, so creating a certain level of autonomy and not micro-managing is essential to maintaining a productive environment.

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Client Work

Can you give an example of a recent project?

We are currently in the middle of a brand new build for a client of ours, Complete PE. They need a new solution as their current platform is out of date, and in need of an overhaul.

We have redesigned the platform, building it from scratch using modern development frameworks and techniques, aimed to create a more user friendly UX, and easily support the business in scaling and maintaining their web offering in the future. So far, all of the design team and the majority of the development team have been involved in the build.

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What’s working well for the team right now?

I believe the success of our team at the moment is down to recognising everyone's skill set and delegating the right tasks to the right person. Each one of us has a slightly different approach to working on tasks, as development setups vary from developer to developer.

I find it best not to standardise development tools as some developers might find some tools unproductive, some might find working with Git in a GUI more productive then through the command line. Also experience and skill level plays a huge role in how a developer will approach a task, so creating a certain level of autonomy and not micro-managing is essential to maintain a productive environment.

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What does a good week look like for the team?

Being ahead on our workload, having a chance to work on new and exciting projects and features. Some weeks can feel like you’re doing a lot of firefighting, and you’re not really achieving anything. I get a lot of satisfaction completing tasks, and making clients happy when difficult projects finally make the release.  

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Finish this sentence

Most people think our job is about your ability to code, but in reality, it's more about problem solving.