Life in the tech team with Francesco

 

We wanted to shine a spotlight on our great GreenJinn team starting with our tech team. Our unsung heroes behind the scenes. They build our app and keep making it the best it can be. 

GreenJinn team spotlight this time is on Francesco; our mobile app developer. 

A little about me.👋 I am a huge tennis fan. I love pizza (being Italian, that’s a given right?) and reading biography books, my favourite being Open on Andre Aggasi.

How did you start out in the industry?

I’ve always been passionate about tech. I started working on my own, watching youtube videos and reading blogs to teach myself. Even in school I taught myself tech programming. My idol (like many people in tech my age) growing up was Steve Jobs. I saw what he was doing and sparked my interest in the smart phone.

I started off as a freelancer working on websites and some small mobile apps. At the time, there wasn’t much opportunity within mobile app world, but in Italy there were a lot of jobs in tech and programming.

What would you suggest for someone interested in starting out in tech?

You can be self taught in this industry and you don’t need to go to uni. If you like tech, you can learn. If you did want to do a course, there are ones that are about 10 hours total to become a first time developer, but you would need to spend a lot of time outside of this. 

If you have an interest in tech, just start exploring. 

Have an idea? Start working on it.

Google everything. Even now in our tech team, we often google and youtube areas that we do not know! We all do it!

It is a lot of testing and learning. So will need to have some patience. 

You can easily and quickly progress. There are a lot of resources, free courses and books on this area. When I started out there was a lot less available, and it seemed only in English, making it harder for those that aren’t fluent!

What does a typical day routine look like:

No day looks the same but first things first, I will check the programme if any bugs or issues and work on these if there are any.

Bugs can come from new releases (and the same with any other issues). Or the problems could be from third parties like Meta or back end.

We receive tasks from the team which I will get on with or work with other team members together. We often discuss problems together to find a solution.

We often are notified by other team members of any tech issues that aren’t as apparent to us. This could be through feedback from a user.

We have our app available on android and IOS. This does mean that everything needs to be done twice. Two codes or two different languages.

I really enjoy finding the problems and working out the solutions. How can I make this app better for the users.

Anything that use a new feature for the app we will work cross functionally with the customer service team and the marketing team as these are the teams working directly with our users and making sure our look and feel is consistent. 

Why GreenJinn?

We don’t have a hierarchy here. We have managers but we all have an input and our own responsibilities. 

There are a lot of different opportunities to get involved in and different projects. 

We are still relatively remote and I work in Italy so when we do meet, we have video calls but not too many which is good. We use Jira and slack to chat when we quickly have a question.

I have been at GreenJinn since the beginning. I was helping build first mock ups of the app back in 2015. It is really rewarding to see this grow and actually go live! There are so many ideas for apps that then don’t work out, I am proud to see this idea work and help build the app for success.