Know Your Arekibian : Killian
Next on our series is Killian, a senior developer at Arekibo who loves gaming and travelling! ⠀
What was your journey to Arekibo?
After an eclectic education and career path I ended up doing a one year M.Sc. in Interactive Digital Media in Trinity. From that I worked in an Ad agency for a few months before joining X Communications in 2010. Arekibo acquired X Comms in early 2013 and I came on board as part of that merge.
One thing most people don’t know about you?
Maybe that, if I hadn't been accepted to my masters course, I would likely have become a qualified Greenkeeper. I worked at that all through my undergrad and afterward and turned down a job in order to go back to study.
Project you’re most proud of?
It's a while ago now but in 2012 I built an app. The Book of Kells for iPad. I had to learn from scratch how to build iOS apps and really enjoyed the challenge. Working with the source material was pretty interesting too and the style gave us the opportunity to be quite creative with the systems we built. Also, I was on RTE news because of it, which greatly impressed my granny!
3 things you have learned during your time in Arekibo?
- The importance of having a good team. I'm blessed with the backend team I'm responsible for here but also the wider team in general. To be able to rely on them for their skills as well as their support makes my working life a lot easier than it would be otherwise.
- The value of honesty. I aim to always be transparent with my colleagues and our clients about the realities of any work we discuss. A constructive conversation about something today is far better than late night or angry phonecalls later down the line.
- How it is essential to work smart. A key focus for me in the coming year is to continue to improve our use metrics, automation and feedback in our development (and wider) processes. I want our developers to spend as much time as possible on writing good code and learning new technologies and minimise the time spent on tasks that could be handled by a script or tool instead.
One thing you can’t work without?
Lots of screens! No matter how many I have (currently 3) I always manage to fill them especially when working on a site. I can have documentation (or Stack Overflow) on one screen, my code in the middle and the site output on the last one. Less window switching = more time coding!