We recently had a chat with one of our very talented developers, George Frost, to offer some insight into being a Developer at Esendex.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role here at Esendex?
I graduated earlier this year from the University of Nottingham, starting at Esendex two weeks before my graduation! I enjoy cycling and socialising – both of which are embraced at Esendex. In terms of my role, I’m an apps developer working on our showcase apps such as Echo – basically I work on making our front end applications robust and easy to use.

Talk us through your average working day
We start each day with a daily scrum stand up where we gather round our whiteboard, so we can get together as a team to discuss what we’re working on and any progress made.

We work in two week sprints, breaking projects down into user stories – the minimum deliverables you can complete. From this we’ll get assigned different tasks to tackle. We always work in pairs to do this, it’s great having two sets of eyes on the code you are writing and someone to talk through challenges with.

Once a user story is complete we will hand it over to another developer for code review and a third set of eyes will check the functionality before it’s released.

What do you enjoy most about working here?
Without a doubt it’s the people and the supportive, relaxed environment! There’s also beer-o’clock every Friday, which is a great excuse to socialise with everyone in the company. Monthly socials are another great part of working here – we’ve done everything from white water rafting to summer barbeques.

We hold a team lunch every week where we go to a restaurant in town voted for by us.  You’ll also always find me in Rescue Rooms with a few colleagues after work on a Friday.

The opportunities to develop our skills are a great bonus – developers can attend one conference of their choice each year fully paid for. We also practice test driven development, which is key to writing clean, reliable code and it makes my life so much easier! It involves creating automated tests before writing a single line of production code to ensure its correctness – it’s great practice and it works really well.

What skills are important to become a developer?
To be a developer at Esendex, communication and teamwork are an absolute must so we can all work together to achieve the end goal. A desire to improve and learn is also important – we’re always looking for ways to become better at what we do and it’s part of the fun!

What advice would you give someone who wants to be a developer?
The thing that helped me the most is industry experience – in a way Uni teaches you how to learn, but it’s in the working environment when everything really starts to come together. Grab any chance of experience that comes your way! As well as this have your own projects happening on the side – especially contribute to open source projects.

Describe Esendex in three words…
relaxed, agile, purple

We’re always looking for bright, sociable developers to join our talented team, so if you’re interested either check out our careers page or email your CV and covering letter to [email protected].