Viktor D.

ING Belgium hired me primarily for my experience with Polymer. Being offered a position in the retail investments division, I welcomed the opportunity to work on a product used by many thousands of clients daily. When joining, my team had several developers working on replacing a legacy system with a hybrid application in AngularJS. After a restructuring, I assumed shared responsibility with a colleague for all the frontend needs of the application and delivered a successful national rollout on browser. Furthermore, I started leading on the frontend development of a new hybrid application for private banking clients in Polymer, which has since been released on mobile. My day-to-day tools were Polymer, AngularJS, HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. I worked with a strong focus on cross-browser compatibility and security. For continuous integration I used Gulp and Jenkins. For testing: Jasmine, Protractor, Web Component Tester and Cypress. I developed custom utility functions for Cypress to test applications with shadow DOM. The company had adopted the Agile way of working and I was part of a small, autonomous team who were end-to-end responsible for two products in production. We made a lot of decisions ourselves and I touched base regularly with other developers, designers and business stakeholders. As part of a retraining process, I mentored a backend developer to help her become full-stack within the team.

Kano offered me a role after seeing my work at a General Assembly graduate event. Essentially a technological company, this startup was the ideal place to hone my skills as a coder. In my first few weeks I reworked a community page for a Kickstarter campaign in VueJS. This was followed by developing a central piece of the company’s web presence in Polymer, a gamified page where users can launch coding challenges. During this period I also took part in maintaining a Canvas drawing application in AngularJS and an e-commerce site in VueJS. Furthermore, I developed a small application with native Web Components to unify the sharing flow within the Kano ecosystem. After the Kickstarter campaign and a busy end-of-year, I became part of a small group working on Kano Code, the company’s flagship app. Based on Blockly, Kano Code is an intuitive visual coding platform with a number of APIs, hardware kits and sensors available to connect. It was built in Polymer with an additional desktop shell using Electron. Later in the year I formed a team with a designer and a product manager to develop a text-based coding tool as a small-screen alternative to Kano Code. Following a successful year for the company, I began 2018 by shipping an updated desktop shell for the CES trade show in Las Vegas and working on a gesture recognition library for a Bluetooth magic wand hardware. At Kano I had the opportunity to see through projects from start to finish in a fast-paced environment. In addition to coding I also learned about design, project management, Agile, business and various soft skills.