Paul Banfield

Dev Lead

How long have you worked at UnderwriteMe?
Nearly 3 years

How have you found it so far?
The people and the environment are excellent. It is a modern office, with a modern approach to office life. It is good to have some flexibility to manage your home life around your workday.

My team takes an agile approach to development utilising the Scrum framework, facilitated by a variety of industry-standard tools like JIRA and GitHub. With multiple JVM languages (Groovy, Java) enhanced by the spring framework forming our back-end development codebase, and JavaScript frameworks powering our front end (Angular JS and React), our IDE of choice is Intellij and it works really well across the technologies.

With the opportunity to get involved across the whole stack, our developers and DevOps work with Docker and Kubernetes to manage our cloud deployment model and simplify our infrastructure.

With a blend of all-rounders and specialists at UnderwriteMe in all areas of development, there’s always someone to help out and our stack overflow for teams is proving a useful tool to share knowledge.

What does a day look like for you?
My average day will consist of a stand-up meeting with the team at 10 am, followed by any sprint related meetings, client calls and architecture discussions throughout the day. In the gaps between meetings, I am usually mentoring, assisting developers and doing code reviews.

What skill sets are you building in your current role?
I’m building upon my leadership, line management and enterprise architecture skills.

Are you involved in any social activities at UnderwriteMe?
I am normally involved in team lunches once a month and occasional evening drinks.