I joined Fairmort as a graduate developer straight from university and in my first six months with the company I have been involved in a wide variety of projects, which has improved my technical skills, increased my business knowledge and made each day interesting, but challenging. The skills I learnt at university have been supplemented and enhanced with real-world experience of technical projects and how technology is used in the Financial sector. Fairmort have helped me develop as an individual and have given me exposure to different technologies which has improved my knowledge markedly. An example of projects I have worked on include; front-end web development on the WILF Reporting software, developing and then supporting ATM Gateway software, writing the extraction and load routines on the WILF Migration software for a 3rd party banking system and working on the project that allows WILF Reporting to run on Oracle.

During my first 6 months I have had exposure to, and gained experience of, C#, Javascript, SQL, Oracle, XML and NHibernate. I’ve also gained first handed experience of banking systems and using their api’s.

It was initially a daunting prospect making the transition from being a student to a full time graduate software developer, but in the space of under a year I have overcome the challenges presented to me and have been able to make a really positive contribution to the team at Fairmort. When looking back to work I did a year ago I can see I’ve come a long way in terms of code standards & general knowledge, but most importantly, I’ve enjoyed the learning experience. I’ve been assigned a varied set of tasks and programming languages to work with. I’ve not been confined to a single programming language (C#) as I’ve also gained experience with web design and databases. As well as keeping the job interesting I have learnt so much more than I thought in my early months with the company. I’m able to rely on my colleagues for support and help with problems I’m facing. I find it very comforting to know I can always ask people for help and they are happy to assist me with tasks.

I have developed new features for the WILF Reporting tool including cross validation functionality to validate the regulatory reporting, bug fixing and client specific widget and report design using HTML, CSS, JQuery and Javascript. I’ve created a tool to traverse XSD schemas to allow the visual mapping of XML document to database fields and assisted in the benchmarking project to create and load data in SQL and Oracle for the Data Loader part of the WILF Migration application. I was also part of the team that created the Web Scraper application, specifically looking at RSS feeds. I’m involved in a diverse range of projects which makes each day really interesting, helps accelerate my learning, increasing my knowledge and giving me great options for my future career with Fairmort.