Parallax Spotlight: Back End Developer Barnaby Cotter

We’re continuing our insight into life at a Leeds digital agency with our Parallax Spotlight series. This time the light turns to Barnaby Cotter, one of our web developers.

Hi Barnaby, kick us off with an overview of your role and the day to day activities in the development team at Parallax.

Hello! In truth, what I do varies hugely from day to day – there’s never a dull day at Parallax! However, I’m primarily a back-end developer. I focus more on the server-side development and functionality of our sites rather than the aesthetics and design. That means hooking things up to databases, processing user requests, and making sure sites run quickly and efficiently, to name just a few.

You’ve been with the Parallax team since 2013, how are you enjoying it so far?

It’s great! I’ve been here for about 5 months now and I really felt I’ve fitted into my role here. Everyone’s really friendly and helpful. Also, there’s always a new project with a different twist coming through the door, and in just a few months I’ve been given the opportunity to work on some very diverse and cutting-edge projects.

Do you have a particular project that you’ve most enjoyed working on?

Well, we have a super top secret project under way at the moment, which I would have to say is my favourite – but I can’t really expand on that else it wouldn’t really be all that secret! Apart from that, I’ve enjoyed writing some advanced search stuff for www.lemoncake.com. I got to use some cool new technologies, and push myself to pick up and apply a whole range of new concepts.

Are there any particular types of technology or development trends that you see breaking through at the moment?

At the risk of using a buzzword, I’d have to say big data. I think that with the plummeting costs and increased availability of low-cost storage, more and more companies in different sectors are starting to face the challenges of effectively processing their data and pulling out important information. This has led to a swathe of interesting new technologies based around handling such quantities of data, and I’m interested to see where they lead us.

Do you have any tips for young developers who are looking to break into the digital industry in Leeds?

Start a pet project – it could be anything, it doesn’t matter if it has been done before, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work properly or if it’s buggy and hacked together. You learn so much more by doing, and by having something that’s definitively ‘yours’, you’ll be much more motivated to crack on with it. Plus, at the end you’ll have something you can put in a portfolio, something you can show at an interview and say ‘look, I built this!’, and that will carry a lot more weight in the digital sector than x years experience.

Last but not least, what would you be doing if you didn’t work in the digital sector?

I’d probably be using the old mechanical engineering degree. Maybe building Wallace and Gromit style machines to automate my life.

Thanks Barnaby!

If you’ve got a question for Barnaby about web development or life working at a Leeds digital agency then let us know in the comments section below or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook.