Finance Website

I was thrilled to have landed this job after working for TVS for a year, switching focus from a very corporate job in transport to one with exciting new technologies more aligned with my interests was a welcome change. The Virtual Engineering Centre focusses on using emerging technologies to help small-medium sized enterprises in the UK. My first project while working here was to improve the design of an existing website for one of our clients (Unfortunately, the name cannot be posted here). When I first heard that I will be working on websites during my time here, to be honest, I was sceptical. My only exposure to web development was in my first year of university, which had me using technologies that hadn't been used in industry for years. Needless to say, it was quite frustrating. My only respite was that a friend had mentioned he uses the same tech stack and that I should learn it to because it's quite fun.

Learning a new programming language is hard in and of itself, learning a completely new field of programming is harder. While I wasn't thrown straight into a new codebase, I was expected to start creating components out the gate with no formal learning time. This trial by fire approach ended up being quite beneficial as oftentimes learning a skill in an isolated environment doesn't reflect what you do in the real world. Something I didn't expect was how useful AI code generation is for learning (That doesn't mean I vibe coded the whole website by the way!). I found AI generated code lets me understand small pieces of a larger code block bit by bit. Comparatively to traditional learning I'd have to write a whole block of code to see any result, by which time I would have no idea what each bit does, just that I had to write it to get it to work.

While I had not been there from the beginning of the project, this iteration of work for me was focussed on rebuilding the front-end design of a finance website. The company targeted small personal companies, such as local tradesmen, or restaurateurs, to help improve their finances and knowledge around it. For them I had to produce a variety of pages as a part of a small team of 3 people, with me focussing on front-end and them the back-end. This was also a big shift in workflow for me from my previous job. Having people developing alongside me and then having to present that to a client, was daunting but exciting. These were really people's business, so the work I did has an impact, previously unseen in my last role.