Meet the Team: Josh

Our second Meet the Team post features Josh, who’s in charge of much of the front-end development of Nimvelo Phone and our other tools. He’s entirely self-taught, and has a real passion for coding awesome stuff!

Without further ado, let’s meet Josh…

Tell us a little about your role at Nimvelo

I’m one of the developers here at Nimvelo; I work on a lot of the products that our customers and resellers use, as well as some behind-the-scenes tools. I spend most of my time writing JavaScript for some of our front-end products (Nimvelo Phone Manager, Communicator), but I also dabble in some back-end development with Node.js when the need arises.

What does an average day look like for you?

Mostly, I spend my time building and improving the web applications that our customers and resellers use every day, such as Nimvelo Phone Manager, Communicator, and many others. I also sometimes find myself building small server-side applications, or microservices, to support other products. Recently, for example, I built a simple key-value storage API in Node.js that’s used by Nimvelo Phone Analytics to store the custom dashboards that customers create.

I’ll also jump on to customer support from time to time if the rest of the team are busy, but I don’t do anywhere near as much direct customer support as I did when I first joined the company – Dan joining the team freed up a lot of my time to focus on building new tools.

What are you working on at the moment?

Recently I’ve been working on some improvements to Nimvelo Phone Communicator, focusing mainly on usability and reliability, as well as some general tweaks based on customer feedback.

I’ve also been working on a React component library for internal use which will allow us to build new products more quickly. I’m hoping to make this library open-source at some point in the future so that anyone can use it and contribute to it.

How did you get into this role? Is there any advice you’d give to someone looking to get into web development?

Web development wasn’t something I always knew that I wanted to do professionally. I studied Astrophysics at the University of Liverpool and, while it was enjoyable and incredibly interesting, I knew that it wasn’t what I wanted to do going forward. In my last couple of years of studying I started teaching myself some basic web development in my spare time; just plain HTML and CSS, nothing fancy!

After finishing university and moving to Birmingham I started looking through the websites of tech companies based in Birmingham, at which point I found Nimvelo (then Sipcentric) who were looking for a junior support engineer and web developer. I had experience in tech support and a passion for web development, so I applied for the role and joined the team in 2014. As time has gone on I’ve had the opportunity to improve my development skills, so now the vast majority of my time is spent building products for our customers to use.

The best advice I can give for someone wanting to make the leap into web development is to just be passionate about what you do and always strive to improve. This is an incredibly fast-moving industry and you never stop learning. If you enjoy what you do then you’ll find it much easier to dedicate time to improving your knowledge and skills.

What’s the best thing about working at Nimvelo?

I really enjoy the freedom we have to explore new technologies as and when we want, and the trust that we’re given to make decisions about what tools and languages to use when starting a new project.

Once or twice a year there’s also the chance to build something completely different for an event we’re attending or sponsoring. Last year, for example, I built a memory game which we had playing on a big TV on our stand. People dialled a number to join the game, and used the numbers on their
mobile phone keypad to type in the number sequences after they flashed up on the screen. It was surprisingly fun to play and even more fun to build!

Interested in joining Josh and the rest of the Nimvelo team? Please feel free to send your CV to hello@nimvelo.com and we’ll be in touch if we have any suitable roles!