Career spotlight: A Graduate Developer's first 6 Months at Village

I would call myself a bit of a late bloomer in life. Leaving school, I decided to work instead of continuing my studies at university and had worked in call centres for around 10 years before joining Village. 10 years is more than enough time to gauge what you actually want from a career and over time I became frustrated with the tedium and monotony of call centre work. I have always been tech-savvy and enjoyed playing around with HTML and CSS creating web pages for myself. I wanted to develop this further by creating mobile and desktop applications using “proper” programming languages. So, I decided to pursue something I’m genuinely interested in and started a full-time degree at Edge Hill University studying computer science.

Completing my studies, I began working at Village as a graduate software developer. The job includes working in all areas of software development and requires knowledge in MySQL for databases, Angular, HTML and CSS for front end development and C# for back-end development as some examples. As well as using the many different software development tools, I also work across a variety of projects ranging across a broad range of sectors. I really enjoy this variety in both the tools I use and the variety of projects as I feel like I am gaining a strong understanding in all areas of software development.

Learning and growing as an individual is something I feel is a big part of working at Village. My colleagues will challenge me to think about why I write a piece of code in a certain way, and I am always encouraged to think about the best way to do things. We have regular discussions and stand-up meetings discussing software development processes and how we can improve our quality of work.

I also enjoy the office space at Village, it is bright and in the heart of the city centre at Liverpool. The location is perfect for me as I ride my bike to and from work daily. There is also a rooftop garden terrace where we meet weekly for lunch (weather permitting).

The old cliché of software developers working alone in a dark office couldn’t be further from the truth at Village. What surprised me the most since starting at Village is the amount of collaboration that goes on. We work on projects as part of a team and develop in a way that makes it easy for all members of the team to understand and work on. Everyone I work with has a genuine passion for programming and takes pride in the quality of their work and to anyone that shares this passion Village is a great place to work.