Experience
In January 2022 I was promoted to Lead Developer at Aviva. This involved moving to a new team. During this role I mostly provide support to developers in the team by performing activities such as gatekeeping pull requests and providing technical advice. I provide support to the business by performing activities such as high-level estimates, aiding backlog prioritisation and raising work-items.
The team works on a large number of ASP.NET MVC applications. They target .NET Framework but there is a large migration project being undertaken to migrate them to .NET 6.
During this role I predominantly worked on a greenfield project, aimed at minimising duplication amongst various code bases within the business. The project used Akka.NET for its backend and SignalR to update a [React][https://reactjs.org] SPA on the front-end. My existing knowledge of Akka.NET was very valuable to the team.
Upon my arrival in the team, I quickly provided value by improving the stability of the unit tests for the solution which often required re-runs to pass.
One year into the role I became a tech lead, which gave me lead developer gate keeping responsibilities. I also worked the role of lead developer on multiple projects. This involved raising stories, assisting with backlog prioritisation, gathering requirements, liaising with the business, assisting other developers in team, gate-keeping pull requests, managing dev ops pipelines, doing production deployments and running scrum ceremonies when the scrum master was unavailable.
During my time at Aviva in this role I also wrote a simple service virtualisation tool that multiple teams used for over a year as an alternative to LISA/Dev Test before the business migrated to WireMock. This was written in TypeScript and Node.js.
During this role I worked on various solutions built around Skype For Business. I helped the dev team build out release pipelines in VSTS and embrace TDD & testing automation. This involved a large mentality shift with regards to how QA was approached. We tried to involve our testers as early as possible with each user story. I particularly enjoyed embracing TDD.
I led the design of one project that involved the co-ordinating of over 50 machines. It used Akka.NET and SignalR to achieve the distributed computing required. The machines could be configured using an Angular2 TypeScript web application. During this project we hired a junior dev whom I mentored which was an extremely rewarding experience.
I was also stand-in scrum master for this project. I was involved in various Microsoft TAP programs during my time in this role which was very interesting.
I found working with the other developers at Modality Systems extremely rewarding.
This was my first development role. I initially performed small support tasks and developed inhouse .NET solutions. I then moved on to developing enhancements and bug fixes to existing products. These systems were usually 3-tier ASP.NET Web Form Applications with T-SQL databases. I eventually began working on new projects and was the first person at the company to make a website using an ORM back-end (Entity Framework) and the MVC design pattern (ASP.NET MVC). My first project was for the large retail firm Sainsbury’s. I also began writing unit tests for the first time during my time at C A Design Services.