My first 3 months at Adaptable

I was very aware of Adaptable and some of the great work that they had put out in recent years, and just by a pure stroke of luck they were searching for a new engineer to join their team, so with that in mind, I updated my CV and portfolio, and submitted my application through the website.

The interview process

Unlike interviews I had experienced previously, the process was not drawn out and took place in two phases. The first of which was a meeting with Dan (Founder & Managing Director) and Josh (Lead Engineer). This meeting was a relaxed discussion at the adaptable office where I explained my previous experience and discussed how I wanted my career to progress, and adaptable described the business, how it works and who they were looking for to join the engineering team.

After being shortlisted, for my second and final stage of the process, I came back into the office to showcase my development portfolio to Josh and Dan W (Product Engineer) along with sharing my technical knowledge. We all hit it off and it was a really enjoyable experience, I came out of the meeting really enthused and excited at the prospect of working with the team. To my delight, I found out the next week that I had been successful and was offered a full-time position within the engineering team. It was a great end to what had been a difficult year and I was very excited to start this new chapter.

My first day

For me, the day began a little later than the rest of the team, but this gave them all an opportunity to get settled in before my bombardment of new starter questions ensued.

On my first day, Josh introduced me to everyone in the team who I hadn’t met during the interview process. After which Josh took me over to my desk, handed me my new MacBook, and gave me a quick introduction to the adaptable handbook which I gave a quick glance over before my first introductory meeting of the day.

My first meeting was with Olly, (Founder & Creative Director) who was standing in for poor Dan who was, unfortunately, having to sit in the sun all day on holiday in Dubai. Olly talked me through the history of the business and gave me a detailed overview of our client partners and our current projects.

After a quick break, next up was a meeting with Faye (Project Manager) to go through the project management process, how we would be working together including what my schedule looked like for the next few months, and general questions about adaptable.

After lunch, my final meeting of the day was with Josh. We made sure that from a technical perspective I was up to speed with the adaptable philosophy, and that my MacBook was ready to go from a development point of view. I was briefed on what would be my first project to ease me into the team, and then we discussed my projects and training over the next six months including a plan for regular touchpoints to track progress and chat through things.

First few months

For my first week at adaptable, the team came into the office all week (with the usual working week being three days working from home and two days in the office) to help me settle in and to also help me get those first initial snagging questions to the engineering team face to face rather than through a camera lens!

Within my first week, I was tasked with making some amendments and creating a new section to our own studio website, to help ease me into our technical working processes.

My first client project was pair programming with Tom who is another engineer within the team. This allowed us to both bounce ideas off one another and in turn learn a thing or two. We had regular meetings, both in-person and via video call to make sure all the deliverables were on track and to review one another’s work from a technical point of view to help each other improve and grow where possible.

I am happy to say that this project is now live with glowing feedback from the client, along with very positive early results for them from an ROI perspective. If you’d like to read more about this specific project an overview can be found here.

The next part of my adaptable journey was to begin learning a new programming language (React) which is used in our product projects. For this to be as successful as possible, Dan W our Product Engineer has taken me under his wing with a practical approach to learning. Rather than me just staring at a screen and going through endless training videos online, we have had regular touchpoints to discuss and plan the next steps in my learning. I have been tackling different phases of learning React with Dan W setting me different problems to analyse and solve that have real-world applications within a React product.

Approaching 3 months

I have just hit the three-month mark and to be honest, it has absolutely flown by, the entire team welcomed me and made me feel settled within a few weeks. I’m looking forward to working more closely on the digital products we are delivering for our client partners and internally. In summary, I now find myself really looking forward to each working week and what challenges it brings for me!

If you’d like to be part of our engineering team, we’re currently hiring.