I’ve been with Viva IT for just over a month now, almost straight out of university. Based at Dock in Leicester, the office has huge windows and is surrounded by trees, a nice change from the windowless office I worked in at my previous job.
The first week was spent getting up to speed with how things worked around here. I was also assigned my first project, which we hope to be releasing very soon.
Something I looked forward to was getting my new iMac set up with my perfect development environment. I came into the company singing the praises of Vagrant and I was given the freedom to include it in my development stack. Vagrant being Vagrant, I ended up spending a few days painstakingly re-provisioning my machine to get it just right to work with our framework of choice, Symfony2 (I’ve even written a couple of blog posts about it).
Although I’d had experience in using Symfony2, in just a few weeks of developing this project I’ve learned an incredible amount about the framework. For the most part, this is down to the working environment at Viva IT. For example, there have been times where I’ve been working on something and I’ve come across an issue that searching on Google won’t necessarily get an answer. However, being able to discuss it with my colleagues not only helps with getting to the bottom of a problem, but has increased my overall understanding of the causes and why a particular solution might work.
Overall, I'm really happy here, it is very relaxed and there are plenty of challenges to conquer. Looking forward to the next month!