A day in the life of our Senior Front-end Developer, Stu

Stu has been part of the AD team for over 7 years and he’s played a vital role in some of our biggest projects including with The Zoological Society of Milwaukee and Honolulu Museum of Art. He’s also key in maintaining and developing our bridge product, Skyway. So, we wanted to share what he gets up to each day in the studio.

What made you pursue this as a career?

I’ve been coding since I was a kid. My parents bought me a ZX Spectrum 48K computer when I was about 5 years old and I got into making daft games on that. There used to be code on the back of magazines that I’d hack around with and started making my own games. It wasn’t until I was in my 30’s that I started to pursue web development as a career. I was excited by the opportunities that the web presented and so I did some computing courses through The Open University and started making websites. I found that I really loved doing it! I started out by making websites for free for my friends to build up my portfolio, then started to get freelance work. I was a freelancer for 6 years before I was offered a job by After Digital!

If you weren’t a Developer, what would you want to be?

I’ve done loads of things. I used to be a professional musician and was in a touring band—but I don’t know if I’d want to do that anymore! I think I’d still want to do something with computers.

As a Senior Front-end Developer, what is it you do at After Digital?

My main job is to build user interfaces for websites. I am first and foremost part of the development team—and that involves writing code and working with Designers, Back End Developers and Project Managers to coordinate and deliver projects to clients. As a Senior Front-end Developer, my main role is to take responsibility for maintaining code standards, but the team delivers really high quality code and they have a high level of personal responsibility too. I’m here for questions and to make decisions on approaches that we might take towards a project. 

I’m also part of the team that oversees the development of our Skyway product. I’m very protective of it after seeing it through its different stages. 

Describe an average day for you at After Digital.

I start my day by opening emails just before I join standup with the rest of the team. Here we can chat and discuss any problems whilst letting everyone know what we’re doing that day. I’ll then usually arrange quick ad hoc catch ups, and find out if there's any crossovers of work. Then I’ll take time to see if there’s any requests for work from clients. I’ll triage and see if any problems have quick fixes, or I'll provide time estimates and move tickets along. My schedule can vary depending on what the studio is doing. My main tasks can be working on a project or helping clients with maintenance and support.

Apart from that, there’s meetings and regular Dev & Design catch ups. With us all working from home, jumping on a call can resolve something much faster than an email chain.

What is the hardest part of your job?

To not take things personally. It's impossible to make code that is 100% bug free. You can always aim to but you'll never quite reach it. Accepting that things will go wrong and not seeing it as a personal failure is a big lesson I’ve learned. A good developer needs to be pragmatic in getting things fixed and not playing the blame game.

What is your favourite part of your job?

I love problem solving. When crazy challenges get fixed, it is so satisfying and it really motivates me! Having been freelance for a long time, I didn't realise how isolating it was— so it was a real eye opener when I joined AD and became part of a team. I really enjoy having that support and learning from others— It’s a big motivator.

How do you unwind from your working day?

I watch far too much TV and I play with my kittens. They're absolutely crazy so they need a lot of attention but it relaxes me. 

Top 5 tips or tools that you would recommend for everyday use?

• A Solid text editor for writing code. You’ll need something that highlights the errors in your code straight away. Make sure it’s something that you’re comfortable using so that you can be as productive as possible. Our team are fans of Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text.

• Get good at Terminal. I use it all the time and it is a huge time saver. It’s so much quicker than Finder or Windows.

• Storybook lets us build a UI that is isolated from the rest of the application. We can get that over to the design team for review in a shorter timespan and it forces us to think about writing the components in a reusable way. That's been a massive help to our workflow.

• Slack. As much as the notifications can be annoying—it's a great collaborative tool and is much easier to use than other messaging channels. 

Top tip: for staying productive, I find that I need to take regular short breaks. The Pomodoro technique encourages you to take 5 minutes away from your screen and clear your mind. That helps keep my productivity levels up.

What advice would you give someone thinking about pursuing a career as a Front-end Developer?

Build as many things as you can and don't be afraid of failure. Your education isn’t the only thing recruiters will look for. When we’re hiring, we look for a real love of building things and if you find that you don't love that, then development is possibly not the right job for you.

Does working in a digital agency sound like the role for you? We’re hiring! You can work alongside our amazing developers, marketing team and designers to build long lasting partnerships with some of the biggest names in arts and culture, ecommerce and education. To keep up to date with our team, subscribe to our newsletter and make sure you follow us on Linkedin, Twitter, and Instagram.