The Backend half of the development team is responsible for the last part of the development cycle. After a feature is designed and created in the Frontend, the Backend team must make this feature not only functional, but also performant. Nobody wants to visit a slow website, right?
Backend development
More than a Backend developer
In The Valley, we are not just working on a single project. For every client and project there is a multi-disciplinary team that’s responsible for the delivery of the clients’ request.
The multi-disciplinary team isn’t just to share the responsibility. As a Backend developer we work closely with Frontend to implement the HTML and styling changes. However, we are also actively working with the UX-team to make sure the solutions designed by them will also work technically.
Umbraco as our weapon of choice
We are always looking for best-in-class solutions for our customers. To do so we conducted an assessment of the wishes and needs of our clients and our development team. Our conclusion was that Umbraco would become our weapon of choice. Since 2016 we build websites almost exclusively using the Umbraco CMS. Umbraco is an open-source CMS on .NET, and provides a solid foundation for the websites that is both flexible and reliable.
In 2021 one of our developers, Patrick de Mooij, was awarded the Umbraco MVP title. The MVP award is a testament to the efforts and dedication of the main community contributors who embody the values of Umbraco and love sharing knowledge and giving back.
Knowledge sharing
Our Backend team has weekly developer meetings in which they can discuss anything that’s relevant to the team. Whether this is a new update in Umbraco or a cool feature we built for one of the clients that might be relevant to the others. Our Backend developers are dedicated to sharing and learning from on another which helps us stay at the top of our game.
Every once in a while, we replace the developer meeting with a longer lasting hackathon. During these hackathons we challenge the teams with a topic we want to expand our knowledge on. This can be a direct topic for the client, but can also be something relevant for ourselves. Our last hackathon topic was how we can use AI to implement image validation on customer input to prevent unwanted personalization. These are fun, collaborative challenges that function both as team building as expanding our knowledge and skills on cutting-edge topics.
