I’ve been a part of the Digital team for almost five years. During that time, there have been a few changes with people coming and going, the team structure itself changing and, yes, I even moved desks once or twice. After being the sole Justin in the team for about four years now, this is the point where I step back and move on to pastures new. That sentence makes it sound like I’ll be walking backwards, but I probably won’t. It’s a bit dangerous with all the stairs around.
Working in a multidisciplinary team has given me an appreciation for the amount of skill that goes into each stage of a piece of work, from concept and research through to development, testing and deployment. At every point, being able to talk to people with other specialisations has helped to uncover potential pitfalls that would otherwise remain unseen.
I hope that I've left all the apps I've worked on in a much better place than when I found them. Typecase is in the midst of an upgrade and is now easier to use than before. Typecase for Courses arrived more or less at the same time I did, so I've seen the progression from the initial version that was delivered, up to the more comprehensive system that we have today. Our newest design system makes our pages more readable, accessible and generally nicer than those we had before too. I think I can be proud that the only thing I actively made worse was the quality level of the puns in the office!
A friend of mine once said that no blog post is complete without an unordered list, so here’s one with my highlights of my time in the team:
- Helping to make drag and drop components a reality in Typecase, allowing us to move away from Monolithic Forms of Doom (MFDs)
- Conquering the voice in my head that tells me I can’t do stuff to give a talk about the little voices in our heads that tell us we can’t do stuff
- The Great Christmas Buffet of 2019 (I finished off the breadsticks in March ’21 - and survived!)
- Celebrating big pieces of work going live by activating the dragon – and producing a few videos in lieu of said dragon for use during our time working from home
- Acronyming Constantly. Remarkably, the Operation Never Yielded Mirth.
- LunchGames and LunchRPGs
- All of the Beta Badges and Achievementsquares
But ultimately the biggest highlight, and the thing I’ll miss the most once I’m gone, are the people. I’ve learned a lot in my time here and got to work alongside some truly exceptional code, colour and content wizards. They’ve taught me how to be a better developer, a better person and even how to be a reasonable GM for some space-fantasy franchise RPG game. Ultimately, what more could anyone ask for?
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