Meet the Team… Cameron Smith, Developer

1. How long have you been with Gear4music?

Just over a year and a half.

2. Why did you choose to work at Gear4music?

Lots of reasons but the main one is because I wanted to work with people who have experience working on systems that handle a lot of traffic. Oh and working in the heart of Manchester city centre is great too!

3. What does the average day for a Developer at Gear4music involve?

Gear4music has flexible working hours so stand-ups mostly occur around 10am to 11am, but the great thing about G4m is that not everyday is the same, and it depends on what you are currently working on.

At the moment I’m on BAU, business as usual, which means supporting the business by resolving issues raised in support tickets, it provides great exposure to the whole business and it’s systems and provides a lot of satisfaction helping people.

Next week I’m moving back onto project work and will be working on a large project related to customer returns, built with PHP and ReactJS.

4. What have you learnt working at Gear4music?

Lots!

My first project was to develop a Google Datastore backup and restore system and integrate it into our internal developer console. I’d never used Google Datastore before so this was a great project for me to start off on.

And lots of other projects especially around handling lots of traffic and large amounts of data, too many to list here.

5. What’s the hardest technical challenge you got to work on? How different is this to your last workplace?

It has to be one of our large third-party marketplace integrations. Their API was not the best and was largely based around uploading large XML files. However, the requirement from the business was that they should be able to list products easily turning them on and off, be able to update descriptions and images, keep stock in-sync between our many other marketplaces, and most importantly to do this within a timely fashion.

If a product is sold out on one marketplace we want them to know that the stock is no longer available or vice versa.

We achieved this by building microservices that compare if any of our many products have changed then we bundle these updates into similar XML file feeds, and send that data out based on priority. This isn’t as simple as making sure a stock change is a higher priority. A stock going from 1000 units to 900 is less important than a price change or description update. After all this we have to make sure that this update gets applied.

The big difference between this and my previous workplaces is the complexity of such a large number of products, customers, and the consequences of suddenly a product being sold out on one marketplace and others needing to be notified pretty quick.

6. What would you say is the best thing about the office?

The people.

Everyone of all levels of the business are very nice and always open to help and share their knowledge.

7. What would you say to someone considering working for Gear4music?

Go for it! The work is fun and interesting, the office is in central Manchester, everyone is really nice, and we have lunches as a team once a month.