Hello again

Hello reader 🙂 If you’re new here, welcome 👋 - if you’ve been here before, thank you for coming back!

It’s been 3 years since my last post, mostly because life/career/a whole pandemic got in the way.

Since I last wrote I have..

• Moved to a new company! I started working for The Student Room Group in September 2019, to begin with in my first mid-level role as a Frontend Engineer on a product called Enlitened.
• Over the summer of 2020 the pandemic forced us to pack up Enlitened and I moved onto the core The Student Room team. I spent a year working on The UniGuide product, which is a mostly Ruby on Rails based application, and started to integrate a React frontend onto the site. I also led a project to improve the Core Web Vitals of the site, taking the site from having 100% ‘poor’ rated URLs by Google on the site to 99.6% ‘good’ or ‘needs improvement’.
• In July 2021 I started working on the core The Student Room product, a forum site/community for students to chat about anything and everything. I’ve been leading on the frontend architecture front to rebuild the thread pages on the forum site in React - which we’ve just launched!
• I’ve grown so much as a developer over the last 3 years, from coming in as an entry-level mid-level developer, to being promoted to Senior Frontend Developer, and more recently moving into an Engineering Team Lead role.

So why have I resurrected my blog? Well since i’ve been rearchitecting our product in React, i’ve been wanting to dabble in new JS technologies and it felt like a good time to rebuild my site. Any developer will tell you that they get fed up of the look of their site around once a year and feel the urge to completely overhaul it 😂 so I’ve rebuilt my site in NextJS, and totally simplified it down to just being somewhere I can jot down my thoughts about tech or concepts i’m working on. It was trying to do too much before, and people can reach out to me on LinkedIn if they have any questions.

Furthermore, I was a junior developer when I last wrote on here. I’ve learned so much in that time that I want to document for myself to see how far i’ve come, but also for others to pick up to help them with something they’re working on perhaps. One thing i’ve come to realise since taking on a mentorship role as a Team Lead is the importance of documentation, and being able to explain complex concepts in an easy to digest way, and that’s what i’m hoping to bring with the posts coming up

Themes that i’m thinking..

• Core frontend development concepts
• ReactJS concepts
  • Accessibility
  • Structuring a react app
  • Using APIs in react apps
  • React context
  • Testing React apps

Any burning questions feel free to reach out on LinkedIn and I can perhaps write a post for it in the future!