A day in the life of…Kate, Drupal Developer at Torpedo

Drupal Developer Kate shares her experiences of life at Torpedo and her enthusiasm for STEM subjects.

What’s your role at Torpedo, and how long have you been here?

I’m a Drupal developer and I’ve been at Torpedo for 18 months now.

What exactly does your role entail? Can you run us through what you might get up today, for example? 

The main aspect of my work is to build and maintain websites.  

That includes triaging issues people are experiencing, quoting work, working through bugs, building out new functionality for sites and building new websites. 

What tools, resources or people do you depend on to get your job done?

As I work with Drupal, I use a tech stack that suits running Drupal environments, there’s lots of tools that I use, and it tends to vary depending on the task. I work with other developers for support and feedback, and I work closely with DevOps who oversee deployment pipelines – so all together we build, maintain and deploy websites. 

What do you love most about your job at Torpedo? – What’s the highlight of your day?

Problem solving is the best part of my job – it’s essentially what my job is.  

The best days are when you finally get to the conclusion of a tricky problem, it can take anywhere between a couple of hours and a few days depending on the problem but every time you get to the end, there’s such a sense of achievement!  

And what do you find most challenging?

Some of the tasks we have take a lot of figuring out – it can be a real learning curve with new requests so it’s always a challenge tackling something you’ve never done before. 

Is there a particular project that you’re really proud of?

The Panasonic Connect site has been my main focus during my time here, and I’m really proud of that site – we delivered the initial build within 6 months which was extremely impressive for a job of that scale. I’ve learned a lot from it and we really came together as a team to get the initial build over the line.  

What did you see yourself doing when you were a kid?

I’ve always enjoyed STEM subjects so I thought I’d go into engineering of some sort – I did have a brief stint of thinking I could become an accessory designer for Sylvanian Families toys! 

If you weren’t a Drupal Developer, what do you think you’d be?

Something still within the tech space, I’m definitely in the right industry but there are so many different roles that make up a tech team that I’d enjoy: interaction designer, project manager, business analyst, any other developer roles. 

What made you choose this career path? How did you get to where you are today?

I always had a keen interest in ICT, Maths and Science at school so naturally I gravitated towards STEM. I then went to an open evening for a college when I was 16 and was introduced to Computing as a subject and it was a bit of a love at first sight moment! 

After studying Computing at A-level, I went on to study Computer Science at the University of York. Post-graduation, I fell into a Web Development job that specialised in Drupal, which gave me a great space to start building the skill set I now use day to day. 

Studying Computer Science gave me a great start for the working world, it opened a lot of doors and there are so many roles you can go into from that subject. 

When your OOO is on, what are you likely to be doing?

Usually on holiday – I enjoy being outdoors and exploring new places so I take every opportunity when I can. 

What’s your favourite memory of working at Torpedo to date?

The Ultra Challenge in the Lake District.  

It’s very different to my day job and it was a great experience as a Torpedo Team to tackle the 30km hike. We all had such a sense of achievement at the end of the day and I loved being given the opportunity to get involved in that sort of challenge, all whilst helping raise money for charity too!  

What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever been given?

Learn to say no when it comes to managing your daily workload. 

Learning when to say no and managing your time is such an important skill – if you say yes to every task when you don’t have the capacity to deliver it all, you’re more likely to cause issues within the team than if you’d just said no in the first place.