Starting over
A whole new world
I started working as a developer for X402 in November last year. When I began, the team was all developers which included Pete, Graham and Mark. It was quite hectic in the beginning as we were such a small team, but I wanted a job working in a small team because it meant that I got greater exposure to more technologies, allowed me to be more creative and take advantage of my skills.
Previously I worked as part of a team of 150 developers. I had been there for 13 years, so I felt that I was in a little bit of a bubble and wasn’t used to working in the real world. I was responsible previously for developing quite a successful product that is still very profitable to my understanding, but I was essentially only ever working on one product.
Joining X402 was quite eye opening for me as it now meant working on multiple code bases for multiple clients. It was challenging at the start to get my head around all the different code bases, but it is that variety that makes it enjoyable.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!
The improvements that made the difference
There have been a lot of changes in the time that I have been with X402 which include, growing the development team, adding project managers and an operations manager. Our existing clients are a lot happier and we now have a more efficient system in place for providing updates. Having the PM’s on board has freed us developers up to focus on what we do best and we are no not only maintaining the existing clientele but also growing our customer base.
Our work is being delivered successfully and we’ve seen a lot of improvements not just in our processes but also the developers taking ownership of their roles, taking the initiative with things like testing and generally taking more pride in the work we do.
Keeping up with the times…
…and beyond!
Moving forward we will be working with new technologies as we are planning to create an Enterprise Manager Product. This will be a very exciting project and that involves cutting edge technologies like blazer – which is a front-end web application technology – which only came out this year.
In the future of X402 we will have some good offerings on the table for potential candidates who are eager to learn and work with cutting edge technologies. The new project will be based on microservices and it is this sort of new technology that you would expect a company on our position to be working with.