Hi, I’m James Dutton, a senior software engineer at RDT. I graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in mathematics and computer science. I joined RDT in 2013, having run a number of IT-related businesses and worked on and off as a contractor for 15 years.
Initially I wondered how settling into a permanent role would suit me, but I soon grew to love the RDT company culture, strong work ethic, incredible working environment and great coffee! It also helps to be surrounded by a hugely talented group of my peers, from whom I am always learning. The breadth of their experience is astounding.
I have worked in a number of software engineering roles while here. We’re encouraged to expand our knowledge and it’s hard not to. For me this has included keeping up to date with the latest Microsoft languages, brushing up on traditional programming principles, learning new DevOps build and release technologies, and now moving back into web development, my first passion.
The team I work in right now is developing a suite of insurance call-centre products. These are single-page web applications built on the current Angular framework. They are cutting-edge, so we’ve been able to include the latest libraries: NgRx with the Entity State adapter for reactive state management, RxJS for reactive programming using observables, SCSS with Bootstrap for styling. It’s not a free-for-all but if there’s a strong case for us to use something new, we’ll do it. Recently we started using Angular Playground for developing our components in isolation, and it’s helped enormously.
RDT really encourage professional development. Last year I was lucky enough to attend the AngularConnect 2018 conference, where I met Angular core team royalty. On the second day, I was invited to join some of them in an hour-long Angular Air live podcast, followed by breakfast with the conference presenters, an exhilarating experience. This has inspired me to give back to RDT, and I have recently run two lunchtime technology talks, with more to come!