Hi, I’m Simon, I’m currently working as a Casual Software Developer at Jamescape part-time while studying Maths and Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh.
I first met the team back in June of 2023 for a week-long work experience placement, where I was given an independent PHP software project that would add achievements to the company system. The first day and a half of which were rather frustrating with Docker not working on my system, but I still really enjoyed it and all the support I got from the team while working on my project (especially getting my Docker working!). If you're interested in getting a similar work experience placement, check out Harker's (Jamescape's partner company) offer here.
A year and a half later and I’m back at Jamescape doing staff onboarding training and I saw how much the company had grown over that time with a new office and meeting room, but it was still the same friendly and supportive environment I remembered.
In my role now, I'm working on a platform that guides employers through the process of becoming Disability Confident, a UK government scheme that helps organisations become inclusive workplaces. While I hadn’t done any formal web development before, I made a simple web app using React Native for a school project which gave me valuable experience with Typescript.
After a quick crash course on Git, the first steps involved writing schemas for the database I was using and familiarising myself with Next.Js. This is the first project I had worked on that used a database, I wasn’t sure how easy this would be but it ended up being very straight forward.
While none of my courses at University this year are really focused on software development, working here has allowed me to put some of the theoretical concepts I've learnt into practice on a real-world software project.
The most challenging part so far was using the correct types for everything, especially the server actions I had written. It took a lot of trial and error to find something that would work with my schema when trying to create a new user. I understand how useful it is to explicitly define types. My solution was a bit messy and I asked if there was a better way to do things and was introduced to drizzle-zod, which was great for getting types for each server action. Having the opportunity to work under guidance from developers who are more experienced than I am has really helped me quickly grow as a software developer.
I’ve really enjoyed these past few months at Jamescape and the challenges I’ve faced so far have helped equip me with useful skills for the future. I’ve also learned a lot about the process of developing software from start to finish to fit a specification, and have gained some very valuable experience. I’m looking forward to finishing my project here and hopefully the software will support many organisations with becoming Disability Confident.
If you're interested in our Disability Confident SaaS platform and how it could support your organisation to become inclusive, please reach out for a chat.