I joined the BBC in 2006 after a spell of unemployment. I was nervous initially, wondering whether I’d fit in, or meet the expectations of my new colleagues, and whether my skills were strong enough. I settled in quickly though, and set to work crafting elaborate templates for editorial staff to use to produce flat HTML. After moving from a company that used an Oracle back end and embedded Perl in the web pages (in a similar way to how PHP first started embedding code), I was a bit surprised to be crafting XML as the most dynamic part of the pages we created. <\/p>\n
One day (ha!) I’ll write up some of the many things I did in my time at the beeb, but the relevant part here is that after a long time as a dev I wasn’t finding any route forwards, and I was working at a location I hated because of the commute it imposed. Only after we moved back out of Broadcast Centre and back to the centre of London, did I recognise how much of an impact it had been having on my work life balance and mental health.<\/p>\n
I switched roles along the way and found a voice as a respected tester who was quickly promoted to be a senior and a lead. I’ve enjoyed being part of the “leadership” of iPlayer Radio on the web, but there are many changes afoot, the most personally impactful being a relocation back to W12. As soon as that was announced I started looking for an alternative, as I’d told myself “never again” and I like to keep my promises. Especially when they’re to me!<\/p>\n
Although I looked at both dev and test positions, it was a development role where I found success and I’m heading to GDS in the autumn. I always said that people who finish one job on Friday and start a new one on Monday are doing it wrong. I had some holidays booked for August, and my notice period expires in July, so I’m taking a summer to have fun before knuckling down – although I do want to spend a bit of time brushing up my out of date javascript. <\/p>\n
I wrote a big handover document before I left the BBC, and I am planning to turn some of that into blog posts in the near future, so hopefully that will be of interest. Meanwhile, though, I’m doing super fun things like discovering a wasp nest in the garden and getting stung. <\/p>\n
Maybe I’m doing it wrong…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I joined the BBC in 2006 after a spell of unemployment. I was nervous initially, wondering whether I’d fit in, or meet the expectations of my new colleagues, and whether my skills were strong enough. I settled in quickly though, and set to work crafting elaborate templates for editorial staff to use to produce flat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,49,59],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p53gyR-7N","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":486,"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions\/486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawkida.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}