If I could send a message to my 21-year-old self it would be to say that starting your career with a smaller company allows you to soak up every aspect of a business.
It’s the best possible way to learn, so don’t feel you have to go to a big organisation in order to progress.
I grew up on the Isle of Wight and left to study computing at university. Only after finishing did I realise that there were a number of games development studios back on the island.
As a result, at 21, I returned home and began my career with a small start-up called Rubicon Development, based on the Isle of Wight.
It was a games development studio working on self-published titles and I had the opportunity to work on games for both the Xbox 360 and the Gameboy.
‘Don’t be so comfortable in your job that you miss bigger opportunities’
Being part of a small studio, with a close team of four engineers, gave me the opportunity to experience so much of the development process.
I was also fortunate to get involved in things that would have taken years at a larger company.
One of the biggest learnings so far in my career was when I joined the BBC and was able to build on the knowledge and experience gained at a start-up in a larger enterprise.
Being an enthusiastic young developer, I would always say ‘yes’ and get involved in everything, ranging from tech talks to running Upfront sessions for the BBC’s new starters.
The more I said ‘yes’, the bigger my network became, and the more opportunities came my way.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with some great people and managers over the course of my career. Many of them have helped me with my mindset and outlook on life.
I particularly remember one incident where I made a Nginx change that brought down iPlayer for an extended period of time. The less we talk about this the better!
Looking back on this incident, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude at how my manager at the time handled it. I was worried about how badly the mistake would reflect on me, and whether it would undermine my credibility as a developer or limit any career opportunities.
But my manager focused on how much I had grown over the year I’d been with the team and how I had successfully developed to be in a position to work on such high profile projects in the first place.
Continuing to develop was the key and as we learn and grow, we will make mistakes.
I have unintentionally put more bugs into production since then and they still hurt, but I now have a very different mindset when I deal with things going wrong.
Such learnings have helped with my resilience and come in handy with some of the projects we have undertaken at car finance marketplace Zuto.
I’m thinking back to the time we completed one of our biggest digital transformation projects and moved our contact centre onto Twilio Flex and into the cloud.
On launch day, just as BT flipped our phone number to terminate, our cloud application AWS suffered a major outage in the London region and was subsequently unable to provision new EC2 instances for hours.
What a disaster on launch day! In case you are wondering, we had a disaster plan we could calmly put into action and the system ‘kind of’ worked until AWS resolved their issues.
So, for me, resilience, and a willingness to say ‘yes’ are key. I certainly wouldn’t want to give my 21-year-old self any shortcuts to where I am now at Zuto.
Failures and learnings lead to success, and the achievements wouldn’t feel as good without them – they’re all part of the journey.
What I would suggest is that you remain humble, celebrate your own personal development, and support the growth of those around you.