A day in the life of a Naimuri Software Engineer......

Niall Stevenson is a Software Engineer at Naimuri and has been with the business since May 2022. He loves the relaxed nature of the business and said he wanted to be a Software Engineer before he even knew what one was!

1) What’s your professional background and interests
I graduated in 2019 (narrowly avoiding COVID) and spent 2.5 years in Cheltenham before returning up north to Manchester in January and Naimuri in May. I’m mostly a C++ and OOP kinda guy, but recently I’ve been getting into DevOps and CI, mostly because it’s fun (until it breaks!).

2) What attracted you to this role and company?
I’ve wanted to be a software engineer since before I knew what one was! As for Naimuri, my colleagues in the industry spoke very highly of them, something which carried through when I was discussing things with the people in charge of recruitment.

3) What does a typical day look like?
Either mashing my fingers against a keyboard or my head, depending on whether the pipeline is working or not. Swearing optional, but likely.

4) What are the key challenges in your role?
The problem with being cutting-edge is that there’s no path to follow, only out-of-date documentation and issue reports that end with [solved] and no explanation. My old tech lead used to say- ‘if it was easy, everyone would be doing it’.

5) What has surprised you most in the last 12 months?
How relaxed things are at Naimuri! Things still get done, obviously, but going from a very rigid and bureaucratic company to one that just gets things done, has been great.

6) What are the best bits about the role?
There’s problems to solve and you’re trusted to ask for help if you need it or to just vent a bit in the morning standup. The general attitude and character of the people I’ve worked with has been great.

7) How would you describe the company culture?
Open. Everyone knows software engineers aren’t the most sociable, but there will be someone to chat to or introduce you or guide you as you start. And you’re not going to get ground down for suggesting things, even if they’re stupid - you’ll just be taught more about the subject so you can learn.

8) Can you share details of one project/achievement you are most proud of since starting in this role?
I’ve not been here long but currently I’m pretty happy with how a mini-project (to do some strange things in AWS Lambda) turned out - and luckily it seems to be helping others do weird stuff, so that’s pretty great too!