Junior Software Developer at Applied Photophysics

In March 2022 I began working as a Junior Software Developer for Applied Photophysics. This was as part of a small team of four working on all parts of the development stack, front-end, back-end and eventually embedded.

I worked at APL for just under a year, and in that time I contributed to the maintenance of existing products such as the Chirascan and the SX20, the front end development of a new product, namely the SUPR-DSF, and began working on the low level and embedded code for a brand new product that the team and I worked on from scratch.

This varied exposure to the tech-stack meant I received a wide range of experience in various development environments and languages. I worked primarily in C# in Visual Studio when contributing to the SUPR-DSF, but working on the new product saw me coding on a Raspberry Pi with a Linux OS in Python, C++ and C, and implementing protocols such as Modbus.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at APL, the work was interesting and engaging and I feel I learnt lots about coding in a professional environment, best practices, test-driven development, agile development, and just the general process of contributing to a large development as part of a team and how best to collaborate and allocate work flow for a large and complex project. Because the team was so small, each individual was given a large amount of responsibility, and was expected to contribute and collaborate during wider team meetings. In this respect, I was given the task of becoming the 'Hardware Champion' for the new device we were developing, responsible for managing all the softwares physical interactions with the hardware being developed, and expected to be the voice for the software team when hardware issues were being discussed in wider meetings.

After nearly one year working at the company, an opportunity to go traveling arose for me, and I decided to seize the opportunity, meaning I unfortunately had to leave my role at APL in February 2023. I learnt a lot I will bring forward with me into my next development role, and will always remember APL as a great first job.