It’s been GREAT

I’ve never really been asked to write about leaving a company before. It’s like that moment when you get asked out of the blue to give a speech in front of everyone gathered around your desk at the end of the day. Although at least I can edit this.

I joined dxw only in May last year. Harry approached me to talk about joining as part of a growing development team working on the WordPress side of the business. I was looking for a new challenge and some of the problems dxw were facing at the time were things I had recently spent time solving at my last company, so this looked like a good opportunity for the both of us.

Since joining dxw I’ve had the pleasure of working with a superbly talented group of people, in an agency who are definitely doing things the right way. Working closely with clients, not just to deliver what the clients ask for, but what they actually need for their users. Before dxw I worked with 3 agencies whose approach attempted something akin to this, never really followed through, and ended up succumbing to the whims of clients paying the bills. At dxw we’re not afraid to tell a client “no” – for the correct reasons.

Working with the team has been a lot of fun and in my short time here I think we’ve accomplished quite a lot. After a lot of deliberation about how to host our code, we’ve been able to come up with a solution that allows us to perform code reviews and add automated testing to a lot of our projects. It shows that dxw aren’t scared of making positive change.

I’ve touched a few projects since being here but none so quite so much as the Exporting is GREAT campaign, that we built and launched at the end of last year. Working alongside a changing team on the development side and client side to tight deadlines was a real challenge, but something that I’ve really enjoyed. I’m thrilled that my last sprint was spent working to deliver a complete redesign of the front-end of the campaign website. I couldn’t be more happy with the changes we’ve made to make an inspiring campaign more user friendly, based on talking to real users of the product.

It’s an exciting time to be working at dxw, which makes it hard to say goodbye. I’m leaving to join a team at the Financial Times, working to improve the way they build websites for a globally recognised news organisation. It’s an exciting challenge and one that I know I will be better equipped for thanks to the experiences I’ve had with dxw.

Hopefully there are great things to come in both our futures.

Editors note: Adam left on 19th Feb.