Spotlight on the dev team: Alan Saunders

This month, I'm shining a light on one of our brilliant web developers, Alan Saunders. From discovering a passion for coding during college to rebuilding complex server infrastructure under pressure, Alan’s journey into web development is a story of curiosity, adaptability, and perseverance. I sat down with him to chat about his career path, what keeps him motivated, and how he’s keeping up with an ever-evolving tech landscape. 

How did you get into web development? 

I’ve always had an interest in IT, so I knew I wanted to get a job in this industry. But I was undecided as to which area of IT that I was going to enjoy best. 

I didn’t fancy 6th form, so I tried to go down an apprenticeship route in the area of IT support and when that didn’t work out, I enrolled at the local college. It was through college where I did a BTEC in IT and a Foundation Degree in Computing that I found that I quite enjoyed web development more than anything else. 

The courses that I did at college were comprised of a number of different modules, so you can experience a few different areas like; project management, animation, web development and networking. This definitely helps if you’re in any way undecided as to what you may want to do. 

It was through the college courses that I got the chance to become an apprentice Drupal developer as a local company called Hydrant were looking to expand their team with some apprentices. 

Where do you find the most enjoyment in your role? 

I find the most enjoyment when I get a project complete and live, or when I get features built and working and the client is happy with the overall product. 

But I also get enjoyment from working with the other members of the team, especially in the office, where the banter and quite often questionable music choices on the Sonos helps to keep the morale up - especially if you’re working on something that is being particularly problematic. 

What are the biggest technical challenges you’ve faced? 

Initially starting out as an apprentice, the biggest technical challenge was learning how to build more complex websites as well as building websites and features in Drupal, in addition to building on the knowledge of what I learned at college. 

Then more in the early days, there would be times where there was an issue on a website that I was unfamiliar and having to work out what the root cause of the issue, with a view to resolving it. 

Technical challenges would also occur when something unexpected/accidental happens and the process you follow to ensure that the issue is dealt with, resolved and mitigations put in to prevent the issues from occurring again in the future. 

Another challenge was with a client of ours whom we built an intranet for. They had a server stack built by us that required connecting to an Active Directory server at the clients end to be able to facilitate single sign on logins for the clients’ staff members. 

This server stack was using an operating system that was end of life and we were in the midst of getting the upgrade planned, and one of the developers on our end decided to leave the business and it was down to me to rebuild this infrastructure to use a newer operating system, which I did successfully. At the time of writing the hosting is still going strong. 

How do you see your role fitting into the wider agency? 

The developers build the websites/products that our customers come to us to buy, which provides the company with revenue from the customers, leading to company growth and potential further work from its customers. 

Developers can also help the marketing team, by not only building websites/products that they can sell to new and existing customers, but contributing to marketing materials to advertise our business and what we do. 

Developers can also take part in the sales department of the agency to assist with adding technical input to tender responses and presentations, with the hope that the company chooses us as there chosen provider to solve the problems/meet the needs outlined in the tender. 

What changes have you seen in the industry since starting out? 

The web development industry is always changing, and you need to try and keep up with this, so you don’t get left behind. 

Some of the things that I have seen in the last 10 years include: 

• A rise in JavaScript frontend frameworks for building performant websites and apps that pull their data from backend systems. 

• More CSS frameworks have been created in the last 10 years that aim to give the development a better and quicker experience building out a frontend of a website. Alongside this, websites are becoming more mobile first and incorporating responsive designs. This means that you don’t need to have a separate app for mobile versus the desktop site, which reduces cost and complexity. 

• More of a focus on user experience that has resulted in large percentage of websites opting for cleaner designs with simpler layouts/navigation to enable the user to get to where they need to be. This leads into the fact that the performance of websites has also become more important over the last 10 years as it helps with the overall user experience of the website. 

• Security is something that gets thought about in much more depth now, implementing 2 factor authentication and using strong passwords are more and more common on websites these days. 

• An increase in the use of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery to assist with collaboration and also spotting and resolving bugs before they make it out onto production. 

• A reduction in the use of on premises hosting in favour of using the cloud to host websites. This passes on the maintenance to the cloud provider and reducing overheads for the company. 

• An increase in testing frameworks/strategies to help us as developers have confidence in the projects that we built and the changes that we are releasing out to our sites. Especially as websites are becoming more complex in a lot of cases. 

• An increasing focus on accessibility to ensure that the websites that we build can be used by its intended customer base as well as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to ensure that people can find your website, and now AI (Artificial Intelligence) and automation are being utilised to try and help the end user complete tasks accurately and in a timely manner. 

• An increase in the use of adverts for websites/products where the content is personalised using the data from its users. 

How have they affected how you work? 

You need to keep up with the latest trends within the industry in case someone comes up with something new that helps you to do your job better or faster, or even just helps to build a solution for a client that fits their needs better than if you didn’t use the new tool or technique. 

For example, the adoption of CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap and Tailwind - they can speed up web development, as the frameworks provide the tools to be able to build a responsive website faster and better, whilst confirming to standard web development practices, as opposed to building all of the styling from scratch. 

We also need to think about when building or even just estimating how long something that has a frontend will take to build, the need for testing across different screen sizes.  

Plus, as some websites are complex, the need for testing, especially with a number of different scenarios, is important to ensure that the end product meets the needs of the client and functions as intended.  

This leads us as developers to question what we do and consider if we improve in any areas to ensure that we build websites better and faster. But, since the advancement of new tools and techniques available, we have better choice when it comes to scoping out a solution for a client and are able to choose the right tool for the right job. 

We are also more inherently security conscious when building or using websites, as we know what kind of impact a website getting hacked can have on businesses. 

The use of cloud-based hosting has allowed for companies to create simpler methods of getting a website online, reduce the need for developers to perform some dev ops tasks or reduce/remove the need for a dedicated staff member that deals with dev ops related tasks. This helps speed the developer up getting a website online and you are less reliant on internal dev ops engineers to achieve the same task.  

How do you keep up with change in a traditional fast-moving industry? 

You can go to conferences/talks from other developers that enable you to not only gain knowledge, but also network with other likeminded developers. 

But you can be as simple as just looking online, there is much more information out there now as to new tools/techniques or even just the tools/techniques currently being used but being used for purposes that you didn’t know, or think were possible.  

You can also sign up for tech newsletters like https://tldr.tech/ which sends you a daily email with summaries of the most interesting tech stories, enabling you to click into and read more on the stories that are on topics that interest you. 

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in web development? 

Web development is fast paced, so it is important to keep up with what’s going on, so you don’t get left behind. 

But you also have to consider if I am learning how to use a new tool/technique, and I don’t pass on the knowledge to other members of the development team in the company and I leave the business. Then would the development team be able to pick up where you left off and still support the tool/technique that you used. 

Be prepared to hit countless issues and have to ask for help (especially from internet sites like Stack Overflow).  

We’ve made probably most, if not all, of the mistakes that you will, so don’t be too afraid to make mistakes or find a friendly team mate to check what you are about to do before you do it.