Long Abscence

It’s been an awful long time since my last entry in here, so I thought I should explain what I’ve been doing with myself since last January.

Whilst I’ve been very lucky to have my parents support me throughout my course (so far!), I’ve also had a job pretty much since I started at Southampton. My first job involved cleaning lecture theatres after hours. The company I worked for (Chilworth Media) were keen to hire ECS students, as the job involved cleaning and troubleshooting problems with expensive projection equipment.

In early January, one of my flatmates approached me with a flyer he’d picked up in Zepler (one of the ECS buildings) for a local consultancy company (Buckle Consulting), specialising in web development. I submitted my CV (that we’d made as part of our INFO1010 module in Semester 1), and within a few days I had a response from them saying that they would like to interview me. After an informal interview (in the Stags Head pub), Chris Buckle contacted me saying that he would like to offer me a job working as a web developer on behalf of Buckle Consulting.

I’ve been working with Buckle Consulting for a little under a year now, and have recently been promoted to “Project Manager & Senior Developer“. The fast, varying pace of work from this job has given me a lot of experience of real world development, as well as experience dealing with customers directly.

I’ve worked many different web sites and web systems, ranging from working with the NHS on a taxi-booking system with a full XML API integrated by them into CaMIS, to working in Bristol and Southampton with The Adventurists who run adventures promoting “glorious mayhem”, and more recently an international courier company parcelmonkey.co.uk who have been featured on moneysavingexpert.com and many other sites in-between.

I’ve recently been contracted by Parcel Monkey to work part time for them as a web developer and providing technical support to customers as well.

My advice for any students looking to get a tech-job whilst at ECS would be got them to get as much experience as they can with an open-source project. I was involved with the aMSN-Project for a number of years prior to University, and this gave me invaluable experience in SCM development patterns and release cycles, that have proven extremely useful in both my course and my job.

So that’s my excuse for my lack of blogging. I’ll do my best to post on here about exciting events at ECS, like Richard Hammond appearing in the labs one day, or the impending doom of the exams that are currently on, but for now “that’s all folks”.