Blowing my own trumpet

Ok. So I have been in the job for about ten weeks now and I have managed to bring something to the company.

What have I brought?

• Standards compliant development
• Accessible development
• More concerted SEO practices
• Use of SE friendly URL’s
• Favicons

A few weeks back, I was asked to do a presentation for account managers and senior staff about meta data. As a result of the success of that, I was given the added responsibility of quality checking new builds before they go live. This gave me the opportunity to turn around such things as developers using images instead of text for the entire main content of the site, and, failing to use title tags properly, or even body tags at all!

I was surprised about the way some developers were building websites. When I brought this up with a colleague, he explained that the main driving force was quantity not quality, thus, developers were forced to get a website completed as quickly as possible. That’s something I have learnt.

Next, I have to get them using semantic markup. Difficult task as I’m still new to the company and I am in fact, the most junior person there!

Job Interview

On Thursday 27 Mar 2008, I had a job interview in Manchester, UK. It was the first one I have had for a long time, so, I was very apprehensive. Fortunately, I arrived early enough to have time to cruise around looking for a suitable parking space.

Anyway, I parked up and entered the 18 storey building where the interview was to be held. I booked in at reception and was told that the company I was there to see lives on the 14th floor. Thank God the lifts were in good working order!

The Company

I am not going to name the company, but I will say it is a large new media agency with approximately 1000 clients around the UK. They have a small team of developers and designers, and were looking for PHP programmer to join the team.

The Interview

I thought that, generally, it went pretty well. The interview was really more of a chat about what they were looking for and what I can do. They were looking for a programmer competent in PHP, XHTML, CSS and MySQL. It appeared to be ideal for me.

The interviewer acknowledged that accessibility and standards had not been a priority when designing the websites. As standards and accessibility have become a kind of obsession of mine, I had brought it up during the interview. Maybe this was a mistake!

He showed me plans detailing the structure of the websites they build. I was elated, as they build them exactly the same way I built my personal website. That filled me with confidence. Then when he asked if I was able to create tableless websites, I was over the moon because that’s the only way I do it now.

The interview lasted just 25 minutes and I was brought down to earth at the end when he informed me that I was just one of five people he was interviewing that morning for the role. One of my competitors was a programming expert from Russia!

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Update

Well you may be surprised to hear that I was offered the job. I was certainly surprised – particularly when I was up against the Russian programming expert!