Parallax Spotlight: James Kirkby Front-end Web Developer
Want some insight into life at a Leeds digital agency? Well you’re in the right place, our Parallax Spotlight series is back! This time we’ve decided to mix things up, rather than the usual Q&A session we’ve decided to take a look at what James Kirkby, one of our front-end web developers here at Parallax has been up to in his first four months:
Hi James, tell us a bit about yourself
I’m 24 with a degree in Information Systems with Business Management. When not hard at work, i’m usually at Leeds Climbing Wall, Cycling or making sure my side project breaksmag.com is working. I currently work as the most junior of the front-end development team at Parallax so when I’m not working on a project assigned to me, I’m usually fixing issues in other projects.
What have you been up to since you joined Parallax?
My first week consisted of getting to grips with Expose and CakePHP, our custom CMS. Coming from a Wordpress background, the MVC (Model-View-Controller) and OOP (Object-Orientated-Programming) structure was new to me. I began by fixing a variety of bugs on a whole range of different projects which quickly gave me an excellent understanding of how Expose worked. As we all use HipChat for our internal messaging system, it was easy for me to get help from anyone on the dev team or speak to a project manager for more information. I was given a new section of Swiss Finance Corporation to work on, it was only 2 pages but it took me a few days to get it all sorted. Looking back on it I could probably do that amount of work in half a day or less.
ROCOL
After getting to grips with Expose I was assigned to do a pretty big update for one of our bigger clients, ROCOL, who manufacture and supply industrial fluids to the Ministry of Defence, Airbus and Williams F1. At first it was tough because I was implementing a lot of changes on an already existing site. However, it meant that I learnt more about some of the back-end features of Expose which has proved extremely useful in the grand scheme of things. Also, it meant that I learnt more of the uncommon Git functions and its use on larger projects.
Leeds Congenital Hearts
After the ROCOL rework I was given a project for Leeds Congenital Hearts, the heart unit at Leeds General Infirmary treating congenital heart disease, arrhythmias and acquired heart disease. As this was my first website from scratch (in comparison to ROCOL where most of the back-end code had already been created) it allowed me to apply what I’d learnt from ROCOL and apply it to this site. Due to most of the websites I’d worked on being ‘older’, I hadn’t had chance to properly use tools like SASS and Grunt so this was an excellent opportunity to take advantage of these tools.
Cauldron Foods
Cauldron Foods had been originally started by our lead developer Andy. However, it was passed down to Me and Danny to finish. Fortunately, having Danny sit next to me we were able to communicate and using tools like Stash (our repository management application) and JIRA (our bug tracking application) it made it easy to collaborate our work and track which task we were working on. It meant that we were able to work on different tasks and once complete, pick another without crossing paths.
ROCOL Ecommerce
Moving back to the ROCOL project I was tasked to build an ordering system for clients. With limited knowledge and experience working with back-end development, I took it as a great opportunity to learn more about how Expose works from the back-end. At first it was very difficult as I was out of my depth, but after a few cycles of writing and rewriting my code, everything came together and worked. Another advantage of learning whilst working on this project was that I also picked up Behat testing which meant that we could automate tests so that whenever we update the site we’re not breaking anything.
Hisense Sero 8
This was a ‘one-page’ website for Hisense USA, to showcase the new Sero 8 tablet. This wasn’t a standard responsive site, each section needed to size proportionally in the users browser, so I ended up using a lot of Javascript to help size elements. Because of the nature of the site, there were a lot of large images that had transparency. These have large file sizes, so they aren’t suited for users on a mobile. The solution to this was to use responsive images, so smaller browsers such as mobiles and tablets will be shown smaller images in comparison to the images shown to users on a large monitor. All the assets were compressed and optimised to reduce load times of the page.
What tools are you enjoying using at the moment?
- SASS – A very popular CSS pre-processor – Before I worked here I didn’t need to use it very much. However, I wish I had, it makes writing CSS much faster and there are loads of other features that vanilla CSS doesn’t have.
- Grunt – The Javascript task runner – This tool watches your files and performs actions based on changes you’ve made. Saved one of your SASS files? No worries, it compiles everything to CSS. Saved one of your JS files? Run it through JSLint to check for errors. Added image to your website? Run those through imageoptim to they’re optimised for the web,
- Xcode iOS Simulator – We’ve been busy making a lot of responsive websites at the moment and it’s often easier to have a virtual version of an iPhone or iPad on your screen whilst developing, instead of having the physical version on your desk. We also use Browserstack and have our own DeviceLab that we use for testing.
- Hipchat – Our internal chat client that we use to speak to each other, have group chats for projects, and send snippets of code, quotes and files we need. We also run a chat bot that automates much of our tasks from deploying and crawling, to producing animated gifs from the internet.
Thanks James!
If you’ve got any questions for James about life at a digital agency or web development then feel free to get in touch below, or on Twitter and Facebook
Or how about joining us? We’re currently looking for a bright, motivated and hard-working individual to fill our front-end web developer position where you’ll get to work with some of the biggest global brands. If you think this is something you’d be a good fit for or know someone who would, please head over here or contact us