At Gene, I'm working on both Magento 1.x and 2.x builds. The demand for stable, bug-free Magento 2 builds is high in the current e-commerce market. Not many companies are currently able to do this right and abide by Magento best practices. In my short time working with Magento 2 my crowning achievement is building a subscription system, allowing customers to create recurring purchases.

My personal focus in this role has been to improve code quality by employing strict PSR2 compliancy with an additional aim towards writing more efficient code. However, I believe this cannot be achieved without well thought out functional/technical specs. A large portion of my time has been spent identifying the best architectures and approaches to ensure efficiency and functionally to exceed client expectations.

Building upon the streamlining of Folk’s support processes I developed a passion for Backend Development and Technical Consultancy. This position gave me the opportunity to do the following :

- Deliver well designed Backend solutions to fulfill client requirements under tight deadlines. - Create bespoke Modules for the Magento platform. - Streamline Folk’s DevOps activities to create scalable and robust solutions. - Work directly with Folk’s clients to help them realise their business goals.

Key to this role was setting up development environments with the tools required to optimize the development process. This included creating VMs, server setup and finding ways to automate common tasks. This ensured projects stayed on track and the rest of the development team had everything they needed to create astonishing and beautiful websites.

After a year as Web Developer at Folk, I was promoted to Support Lead. In this position I was responsible for :

- Scheduling and Management of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) team.
- Developing and improving the SLA and Warranty process.
- Developing and improving website features for legacy clients.
- Ensuring client happiness.
- Managing the SLA team to deliver work to a high standard whilst hitting SLA deadlines.

Folk’s SLA agreement promised to meet response and resolution times that were regularly being missed. Under my management and process development we were able to promise a free month of SLA if any of these deadlines were missed. For some clients this meant providing 24/7 support coverage.

My first job out of University having predominantly studied game development. I was responsible for helping the team deliver Wordpress and Magento builds.

To develop my knowledge of Folk’s clients and projects, I challenged myself to review sites and make recommendations for improvements and bug fixes. This lead me to pick up a lot of the SLA work as I quickly became knowledgeable in identifying vulnerabilities and typical development oversights. From there, I was offered the role of Support Lead.