Q: What does your job entail? What do you find exciting about it?

As a project leader, my job is to make sure the team delivers projects on time and to a high standard, facilitating the team’s work and ensuring they have everything they need to achieve the project’s goals. 

As well as being an incredibly varied role, one of the most interesting aspects of this job, is being able to put in place and refine processes and observe the resulting effects they have on the team; improving the flow of ideas, self-development, happiness, and productivity. It is also a fantastic opportunity to keep learning new technologies and techniques, and to discuss with the team how and where they could be used.

Q: What attracted you to this role?

It was a natural progression from Senior software developer. At the time I was getting more and more interested in learning processes such as Agile and design sprints, so it was a good opportunity to put some of these concepts into practice. I also very much enjoy interacting with others, and this role relies heavily upon interpersonal communication.

Q: How long have you been working here? 

Long enough that I’ve seen people come and go, not long enough that I know everyone (do you ever?).

Q: What was your background before you joined the team?

My university background is in cell biology, although I gravitated towards bioinformatics for my MSc. I mostly learnt programming during my first job in a bioinformatics company and then furthered this learning as part of the CSBC at Cambridge University. Although most of my career has been coding in Java, I switched to JavaScript some time ago (and don’t regret it!).

Q: How have you integrated in the team?

Most of the team were recruited specifically for the current project I am leading. It has been fantastic to get to know everyone, and their contributions to the project are outstanding. A great strength of this team is that everyone cares deeply about the project and is able to voice their opinions and ideas freely. This sometimes leads to animated discussions, but it is often from these clashes of ideas that an even better ones arise, so I believe these must be encouraged!

Q: What do you like about working here?

The people. I love the fact there is such a mix of cultures, ideas, etc…

Q: What are some of the most interesting projects you worked on?

Without a doubt the most interesting project I’ve worked on is the current project, the complete redesign of the UniProt website, the leading resource for protein sequence and annotation data.

I’ve also always been interested in data visualisation, and the other project close to my heart has been the creation of a library of data visualisation components, the Nightingale library, created alongside developers from other EBI resources. This project is slightly atypical in the sense that it developed organically and was born from enthusiasm and opportunity.

Q: What advice would you give to someone who was applying for a similar role?

It’s about listening. Keep an open mind, keep learning, keep growing…and help others grow with you!