I’ve been managing the Development Team within Web for just over six months now. Prior to that I was the teams’ Senior Developer for almost six years having come to work in Dundee from the applications division at The University of Edinburgh in 2017 (and local government prior to that). I have a a lot of experience developing applications and managing projects within higher education, line managing a team certainly adds layers, but thankfully more like a cake and less like an onion that wants to make me cry!

What does the development team do?

So what do we actually do in the development team within Web Services? Development work is often seen as somewhat of a mystery but essentially most of the work we do is about supporting the delivery of content through the University website. We do this by enhancing, supporting, and integrating Drupal (our content management system).

But working with Drupal is not all we do by any means! We’re also responsible for managing the infrastructure that sits behind the website, the various WordPress blogs, the integrations with core systems, and constantly learning, improving, innovating and providing technical leadership to deliver new solutions to enable the rest of Web Services and wider External Relations to deliver on our core objectives.

I’m really proud of the work we’ve achieved over the last few years delivering the new Drupal CMS. We’re at the forefront of Drupal development using Docker and DDEV for local development coupled with an automated workflow through GitLab CI, and a well established agile approach to projects using GitLab issue tracking and Kanban boards.

Where are we going?

Over the coming months we’ll be looking to introduce more automated testing into our workflow to make our deployments more robust and reduce the amount of human effort required for testing. We’ll also be looking to migrate from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10, and complete our move away from remaining on-site infrastructure for the website to being fully cloud based.

We have a lot of interesting work ahead and a strong team in place to deliver it. I’m looking forward to sharing our progress and introducing you to the rest of the team here on the blog.