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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>), 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<\/a> contacted me saying that he would like to offer me a job working as a web developer on behalf of Buckle Consulting<\/a>.<\/p>\n I’ve been working with Buckle Consulting<\/a> for a little under a year now, and have recently been promoted to “Project Manager & Senior Developer<\/a>“. 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.<\/p>\n I’ve worked many different web sites and web systems, ranging from working with the NHS on a taxi-booking system<\/a> with a full XML API integrated by them into CaMIS<\/a>, to working in Bristol and Southampton with The Adventurists<\/a> who run adventures promoting “glorious mayhem”<\/a>, and more recently an international courier company parcelmonkey.co.uk<\/a> who have been featured on moneysavingexpert.com<\/a> and many other sites in-between.<\/p>\n I’ve recently been contracted by Parcel Monkey<\/a> to work part time for them as a web developer and providing technical support to customers as well.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> project. I was involved with<\/a> the aMSN-Project<\/a> for a number of years prior to University, and this gave me invaluable experience in SCM<\/a> development patterns and release cycles, that have proven extremely useful in both my course and my job.<\/p>\n