Joining ResponseTap

As a software engineer, it’s not always easy to find a company that uses cutting-edge technologies.

So when I was looking for a new challenge two years ago and came across a Manchester-based business that was using Amazon Web Services (AWS), I leapt at the chance to join them. Relocating from France to the UK was a scary decision to make, but working at ResponseTap really was too good an opportunity to pass up.

My background lies in building service-oriented architecture (SOA) web applications, but I’ve always been keen to learn more about AWS and microservices like Lambda, Elasticsearch and DynamoDB.

I was immediately brought up to speed on those Amazon services when I started at ResponseTap. Shortly after that, I joined a small greenfield project that consisted of three software engineers, a tester and one tech leader. I already had an idea of agile methodology, but this would be my first time working on an agile project.

The team leader explained to me how they implemented agile techniques and we got started on three-week sprints — agreeing together on the amount of work we were committed to complete first. Each morning, we had a daily meeting to give visibility on what everyone was doing and raise any blocker. Then, when the sprint ended, we did a retro session in order to keep improving and a review to look back on our work.

I was quickly trusted to complete work by myself, but preferred to use pair programming on my first task to assimilate the development life cycle:

· Development

· Code review

· Deployment (test environment)

· Testing

· Deployment (production environment)

The code review was done with a software engineer that wasn’t involved at the feature development stage. The aim was to get feedback and make improvements when required. It helped me to learn more about Java 8 and I liked sharing my knowledge by giving feedback to my pairs.

Having a tester in the team was a big change from my previous experiences where I had to test my features alone. Although I ran some of my own tests during the sprints, the QA software engineer was always on hand to ensure that the quality of my work matched the requirements.

That respectful, attentive approach can be seen everywhere at ResponseTap. The engineering team is composed of people from different backgrounds and levels of expertise. We work in an open space which facilitates interactions between teams and creates a really good atmosphere.

Two years at ResponseTap later, I’m now AWS-certified and happy to be part of the team. Making that initial change to join them was scary, but as Barack Obama said:

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”