This is the third in a series of blog posts about some of the key members of the Zarr team. Daisy talks about her role on the web development side at Zarr.
I have been working as a web developer at Zarr for just over 2 years now. I work in front-end development meaning that my job focuses on the way a website looks and functions. This involves maintaining or making changes to a pre-existing website as well as creating a whole new site from a given design.
Due to the bespoke nature of the websites we develop here at Zarr, each project has different requirements which means that my day-to-day job can vary quite a bit. It can involve making changes to website content in the code, changing aesthetic elements, or adding new functionality - some examples that I have worked on in the past include coding forms, galleries, hero banners, as well as adding new features in the CRM system and working with the database to present specific information in an easy-to-view way.
Throughout school and college, I always found completing IT projects fun. It was a subject that I was interested in and spent a lot of time working on – much more than any other subject! I enjoyed problem solving and seeing something that I had developed come to life. After finishing college, I took a gap year and decided to start learning more about web development and coding by signing up to online courses and other resources that I found. I liked being able to use technology to create solutions that could help organisations complete tasks more quickly and efficiently.
After that I attended the University of Northampton where during my first year, I volunteered at a coding club run by the local council. I taught web-based coding languages (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) to a small group of secondary-school aged students. I enjoyed teaching these skills that I had learned to others and getting young people interested in coding. As a woman working in STEM myself, it is important to me that women and girls have opportunities to get involved and enjoy working in these fields, and it is something I would like to be more involved with in the future.
I graduated university achieving a first-class with honours in my BSc Software Engineering degree, and despite learning about different fields of technology whilst at university, web development and databases continued to be my favourite. In my final year I chose to complete my dissertation in this area too where I was able to complete a real-world project to design and develop a bespoke website for my client to promote their organisation and facilitate their bookings process. I was also able to take on a few freelancing web development projects around this time as well. I learned so much from these opportunities because it gave me so much experience in not only the technical side of web development, but also working with clients and making sure that the completed website produced everything that it was required to.
Web development is an area that can change quickly because there are always so many new innovative ideas being worked on to ultimately make websites more optimised and function better. Over the years, websites have improved so much, a few examples of this include how there is more interactive functionality available which increases user engagement, responsive design which allows a website to look and work well on any device and browser, and improved accessibility features so that everyone is able to access and use a website. Because of this, I have continued to do online courses to keep me up to date on the evolving area of web development. I can’t wait to see what happens next!