First external developer hire, in a team that grew from one engineer to nineteen over five years.
The work
Market research software: the survey products the business ran on, and the desktop tools alongside them. Inherited as legacy VB.Net and modernised in place while they stayed in daily use.
The business acquired other research agencies repeatedly across those five years, the name changing from Morar Consulting to MIG Global to Savanta along the way. Each one arrived with its own way of working, and the aim each time was to move it onto the in-house software.
What I was responsible for
- Extending the survey platform and the desktop tools alongside it
- Feature work to close the gap between the in-house software and how each acquired agency already worked
- Introducing TypeScript and React, and carrying out the migration
- Introducing continuous integration and deployment, on TeamCity and Octopus Deploy, replacing manual process that had been taking roughly half the team’s time
- The move from on-premise hardware to a redundant Azure setup, including the switchover
- Two zero-downtime DNS migrations, each moving more than ten survey sites
- Hiring, as the team grew from one engineer to nineteen
- Line management, and setting how the team worked day to day