A day in the life of a Back-End Developer, Neil Berry (2024)

A Day in the Life of a Back-End Developer (Neil Berry)

Key technical concepts and technologies

• Core stack: Drupal and Symfony for application development.
• Architecture patterns: microservices, APIs, and serverless (AWS) to scale and move heavy/long-running processes off main servers.
• Infrastructure: AWS (including serverless architectures) and different storage mechanisms inside microservices.
• Performance optimization:
  • Re-architected legacy APIs from slow replicated-data endpoints to a live microservice.
  • Optimized long-running processes (example: reduced a report job from 10–30 minutes to ~20 seconds by changing how/where it runs and scaling memory).
• Developer responsibilities: building websites, microservices, and APIs; designing developer-facing architecture; ongoing maintenance, production support, troubleshooting, and problem solving.

Focus on defining what “good” and “complete” means, and delivering clear client value.

Product, features, and projects

• Rebuilt a legacy product/media API into a production-grade microservice — improved performance, enabled live serving, and onboarded more vendors.
• Built an internal “seamless” microservice for the PDS/PSD that has served websites in production for years.
• Worked on integrations and microservices for large clients (example: Panasonic — coordinating European and Japanese teams).

Team structure, processes, and culture

• Team composition: back-end developers, front-end developers, QA.
• Career progression and roles:
  • Senior developer → Principal architect (integrations/APIs) → Application lead → Head of Development.
  • Roles include mentorship, architecture design, and improving team efficiency.
• Hiring and skill focus:
  • Diverse hires (including code-school grads).
  • Emphasis on problem-solving aptitude over a fixed baseline of skills.
  • Strong support and mentoring culture.
• Knowledge sharing:
  • “Launch-and-learn” internal talks.
  • Ad hoc mentorship through one-to-ones and peer support.
• Values: delivering client value, continuous improvement of processes and tooling, and clear definitions of quality and completeness.

Work-life and team activities

• Flexible hours; ability to finish earlier and spend quality time with family.
• Team social activities: weekly collaborative gaming sessions and occasional outings (example: axe throwing).

Guides, tutorials, and reviews

• No external tutorials or product reviews noted.
• Internal knowledge-sharing practices:
  • Launch-and-learn sessions.
  • Informal mentorship and peer assistance.

Concrete examples and measurable outcomes

• Report runtime improvement: reduced a task from 10–30 minutes down to roughly 20 seconds.
• Migration success: moved from slow replicated-data workflows to a live microservice used in production and by multiple vendors.

Main speaker / source

• Neil Berry — Head of Development at Proctors (primary speaker).