In this blog, we catch up with one of our Senior Developers, Michael Green to understand what a typical day looks like for our busy technical operations team and importantly, tap into his views and ideas to help optimise user engagement with AssessNET.
Q. Can you tell us, what does a typical day in the life of a Full Stack Developer look like?
Here’s the thing… there is no typical day!
Our primary focus is always on development and our agile sprint methodology ensures that there is always week-on-week progress made on both internal improvements and client requirements. Development may be in the form of writing code to define how a page in AssessNET looks and behaves, or it might require changes to the database to see how the data is stored or returned. These are the main areas that myself and fellow colleagues will make additions and amendments to on a day-to-day basis.
There’s a lot of planning. Before any development or change to the system can take place, we need to ensure that the requirements will be met. We regularly meet as a team to discuss requirement changes and the ongoing development roadmap, we do this to define the scope of a requirement and outline projects for the future.
Then there’s support. Whilst we have dedicated team members managing the client user helpdesk on a day-to-day basis, as a senior developer, I may be required to handle the more complex issues raised via support tickets, although it is always great to keep my hand in on first-line tickets. Always responding to the needs of our user-base is what makes our business successful, so it is important to see the types of queries being raised and whether adjustments can be made to the software to respond to emerging needs.
On top of all of these tasks, I have responsibility for maintaining our technology infrastructure. We have recently completed a long-term project to migrate our servers into a virtual environment, providing resilience for future growth and performance requirements. Our infrastructure requires only the lightest touch maintenance on an ongoing basis, but there are periods where significant changes are necessary, requiring planning and time allocation. I also support the internal services within the company, so tend to be the first point of contact when colleagues have technical issues or require hardware changes.
It all adds up to a very varied working week!
Q. With 14 years under your belt at Riskex, how have you seen the AssessNET health and safety system evolve during that time?
One of the things I think we have been good at over the years is ensuring that system changes and upgrades do not interrupt day to day operations of our clients. In 14 years there have been significant advancements to the code we write and the infrastructure that supports it, but in day-to-day usage AssessNET has remained a stable platform to support Health and Safety Professionals in their activities.
We have increased the number of modules available to clients and introduced new features into pre-existing modules. However, none of these changes impact the overall workflows and always aim to improve them.
AssessNET has a very active user-base who we are in contact with regularly either through support tickets or direct one-to-one communications. A lot of the functionality introduced over the past 14 years, is the result of listening to client requests and working with them to build the features they need. We will always, where possible, try to ensure that such requests are to the benefit of the wider client audience. Where that isn’t possible, AssessNET’s modular structure allows us to focus the development to a specific client.
Growth in the company in the last few years has allowed us to increase resource in client communication and we’re seeing great benefits, both to us and our clients, in doing so.
Q. What in your view are the key factors in ensuring a proactive approach to developing AssessNET in line with customer needs?
It is key that at our heart, we understand our subject-matter and where health and safety regulations and changes are being introduced in the future. Riskex employs qualified Health and Safety Practitioners to allow us to maintain that understanding of where the industry is heading and to shape the future roadmap of the software. This shouldn’t be limited to Health and Safety though. As businesses invest in their internal processes, there has become a much closer relationship between Health and Safety and other functions, such as HR, which I feel will be a driver for discussion around needs going forwards.
It is also important to understand the latest technologies available to us and how or when to introduce them to the service. It is of no use for us to jump on the latest development trends if browser support is limited. Likewise, ensuring that our infrastructure is robust, up-to-date and offers the necessary resilience’s gives us a stable foundation on which to build the software and offer additional services, such as our offline mobile apps or our advanced Business Intelligence tools.
Lastly, we have to continue to listen, something we have always been good at. We have a consistently loyal client base and it is always of interest to hear clients requesting similar features at the same time. Over the years, AssessNET has been enhanced considerably by taking on board the requests of our clients and embedding them into the software.
Q. What’s the most exciting project you are currently working on?
As the final pieces are being put into place to complete the migration of AssessNET to our latest platform, it allows us to start thinking ahead to future possibilities in the software. Although I can’t go into specifics, we are in the early stages of planning a redesign of AssessNET’s navigation which will bring a more modern approach, in line with other SaaS applications.
Q. And finally, what are your main interests outside of work?
With a young family, my time for interests is limited! However, when I get the chance I enjoy working with wood and tinkering with small electronic projects. I’m a big kid at heart and find building LEGO models quite therapeutic. I love driving and have had some of my best ideas whilst navigating country lanes. I also enjoy cycling and family picnics. My head is always buzzing with ideas both for work and outside and these are all activities that allow me to shut out the day-to-day and switch off.
