My week of work experience with Nexer's Technology Group, by Ben

Last week, I spent time as a full stack developer at Nexer Digital under the supervision of Capability Lead for Technology Dave Brislane and Technology Delivery Manager Sarah Crickmore-Clarke.

Monday

On my first day, I met with Nexer's Managing Director Hilary and Dave, to discuss the work being done at Nexer and their core company message. I then met with IT Officer Tom who helped my set up the laptop that I would be using for the week, signed me into Office 365 and gave me a tour of all the facilities that the office offered.

I then met with Ryan Hill and Molly Barnes, Accessibility Consultants at Nexer. At Nexer, they take great pride in accessibility features, ensuring that the solutions that they provide for clients are usable by all. They gave me a unique insight into how someone with access needs might or might not use a website and how the company can develop it to adapt. I also had an overview of user experience design for websites.

I then met with Dave again to discuss Umbraco, one of the main Content Management Systems (CMS) that they use at Nexer. I gained an understanding about how a client can use a CMS to customise their website without having to delve into the deep code and understand the syntax. I also was given my task for the week to try and use Umbraco to develop my own webpage.

Tuesday

On my second day, I first began installing all of the systems that I would be using to develop my website including Visual Studio Code as my IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and installing .NET sdk on my machine so that I could install Umbraco and begin locally hosting a webpage and begin developing it.

I then met with James Cross, Practice Lead for Development at Nexer and learnt about what the day-to-day activities of a developer at Nexer are. James walked me through the ticketing system that they have in place to ensure that each dev knows exactly what they have been assigned to do based on their expertise.

During my downtime in the day, I began to develop my webpage on Umbraco, aiming to produce something that not only looked professional but also incorporated the accessibility and usability features that I had learnt are so key at Nexer. Working with HTML and CSS was a challenge at first due to it not being my typical programming language of choice (that being C#), however I was quickly able to pick up and understand the basic fundamentals of programming in Umbraco due to the support and resources that the team had provided me with, finishing the day with a basic webpage with a heading, subheading and image.

Wednesday

On my third day, I met with Practice Lead for Development Rachel Breeze, who gave me an insight into back-end development. She taught me about how my current experience in development of games in C# could be integrated into a professional working environment and how accessibility features can be programmed into solutions that are delivered to clients.

I then shadowed one of the squad meetings. This gave me a good insight into how I would work as a developer in the future, working closely with a team to collectively deliver a project to the client with each member of the team delivering their own skillset. I also continued to work on the webpage that I had started the previous day, adding more styling and CSS to my webpage, making it look more professional with custom fonts and images.

Thursday

On the fourth day, I met with Ross Jamieson, Practice Lead for Quality Assurance, to understand why testing is so important when developing solutions for clients, and about how client information is gathered before development to ensure quality. I also met with Lee Emery, Practice Lead for Product Management. She talked me through how a professional agency structure their development into ‘sprints’; structuring development into short cycles with check-ins with clients as they go along.

I then met with Chris Bush, Capability Lead for the Design Group to discuss how the design group at Nexer works, how we can create a more inclusive design for all, and how to ensure that the products built are easily usable by everyone. I also met with Senior Optimisation Consultant Andrew, and we discussed how the analytics and data trends of network traffic are monitored to understand the effect of changes on client website.

Friday

On the final day, I started by continuing to experiment in Umbraco, trialing using a set template and exploring the flexibility and easy editing of a website build in a CMS like Umbraco. I also showed the team my own personal game that I had been developing in Unity.

By the end of the week, I felt that I had developed invaluable experience in how a developer may work within an agency and about how my professional working life may look if I decide to undertake software development. I particularly enjoyed developing a website in Umbraco and getting hands on experience in real development tools. I can't say thank you enough to the team at Nexer for making this a truly great week for me!