Graduate Profile: Thomas Coleman

1. What was your HE course? BSc (Hons) Web Development
2. What is your job title and role? PHP Web Developer, the role involves working on the weekly development sprints in conjunction with my colleagues and the other departments.
3. Could you briefly describe the organization you work for? “Cobalt Telephone Technologies (http://www.ctt.co.uk/) is part of the Parkmobile worldwide group. We specialise in developing and delivering self-service payment and transactional environments, which simplify the lives of individuals and the organisations they interact with. Our solutions, which typically operate via mobile phone, fixed phone or web, are innovative and secure.” Basically a player in the global parking industry. Very cool 😉
4. Which skills learned at University are helpful to you in your job? The ability to problem solve and be able to work with others. The ability to read code and try to understand how it pieces together. If you view University as training you for the working world, when you work hard and push yourself to deliver assignments, it helps translate over into “The real world”.
5. Do you have a typical day and how would you describe it? Typically I get in at 8:00am, look to see what active Jira tickets I have to finish, if none I pick another ticket up from the sprint. I will then start working on the ticket and often with my colleagues. Once I finish the development work (if any was needed), I will test it locally, then push the code to the staging environment and test it there. Once that is done I will ask for it to be code reviewed by peers, who would then pass it on to the QA team who will either verify it and close the ticket (pending being put live once a week), or will come back with feedback, and put it back into development. Typically my working hours are 8:00am-4:30pm with a lunch break of an hour.
6. What aspects of your job do you enjoy most? I enjoy having enough work to do, that I don’t get bored, but not too much that there is too much pressure which would create a bad working environment. I also enjoy that there is quite a relaxed working environment with friendly and social colleagues.