My Journey so far… by Jago Gatley
Enhanced Fertility has an inspiring mission it is pursuing: making fertility care accessible and effective for all. It was an amazing opportunity when I was offered to join them and help further these goals from a software developer’s standpoint. Specifically, there was an opening for a frontend web developer; a discipline I have enjoyed exploring in the past through university study and personal projects so I was keen to experience it in a more professional environment. The startup ecosystem was also very friendly to approach and get involved in; with the company’s relatively small size lending itself to fostering close communication and collaboration both within the development team and across different departments. It has been great to watch Enhanced Fertility grow from the inside, to be part of and contribute to that growth, and to help develop its vision for the future!
Joining a dev team for the first time was a huge learning experience for me; covering proper communication and coding practices, and the importance of consistent refined documentation. With the senior members of the development team to guide me, I have learnt how to write proper pull requests, commit statements and best commenting and testing practices to ensure the efficiency of feature implementations. As is inevitable with any code there is the importance and need for debugging techniques: error checking and fault tolerance, which I have learnt to manage through picking up various tickets in Jira and generally as I get to know the codebase. Also, the importance of documentation to help log and keep track of any changes helps greatly with bug fixes and versioning alike. Many of these lessons are topics I have covered in theory at university and it was interesting to apply that knowledge actively in the workplace.
My focus so far has been on the frontend/web development side of our codebase and as such my JavaScript proficiency has improved in leaps and bounds. I was already familiar with the language but consistent daily exercise within it has led to a much better understanding and the development of some tricks and knowledge in the more nuanced intricacies of the language. Especially so when specialising in the Nuxt and VueJS frameworks, they have helped give me a practical direction and define the scope for my learning, particularly through my research in preparation for and execution of a Nuxt migration of our frontend codebase, from the EOL version 2.x to the new v3. This has led to a deeper understanding and appreciation of web development and I find myself very much enjoying the work that I do!
The job began as an internship working remotely from home which was an exciting prospect but equally as challenging; starting a new career, with little face to face contact, there was a lot of trial and error figuring out how I was expected to perform and navigate the codebase and workplace in general. I had a lot of close support during my internship with an invaluable contact in my mentor Frank and, although there were times I was unsure of my heading, I would argue that this led to a greater strength and a deeper understanding of our systems as a whole, through forcing me to experiment with things myself. This is very similar to my approach to the first major project I have undertaken in migrating to Nuxt 3, with extensive research and lots of experimentation to explore the update and ensure the move is effective.
Aside from coding, I have also recently taken the opportunity to move away from home in the UK and live in Lisbon, Portugal for 2 months, where I am currently writing this document from. This was to enable the experience of working from an office more; with colleagues in the dev team located nearby allowing for more face to face contact and interactions, helping in both the social and work aspect with the ease of bouncing ideas and information between each of us and I am happy to say I feel closer with my fellow devs thanks to this. Although moving across the continent to start anew in a foreign environment, with a foreign language, has been challenging, the experience so far has been amazing and I am looking forward to the rest of my stay here.
Submitting my first, and subsequent PRs was an enlightening experience; seeing my first piece of code pushed to production and viewable in the live app; code I’d written directly impacting and improving a patient’s user journey through the tumultuous time that is infertility care was an addicting feeling to experience. My biggest impact will likely be when the Nuxt 3 migration becomes a reality; I have been working on the project progressively for the last couple months alongside picking up regular tickets and it is slowly getting closer to being realised, so in the event that our live development version goes from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3, it will be a pivotal moment in my software journey. I currently have 15 Jira issues to my name and I plan for many more to come!
The future for Enhanced Fertility is looking bright. There are some big projects in the pipeline that I am a part of that will be awesome to see come to fruition – developing the site further and expanding the company’s reach. One of these projects includes the implementation of an assistive medTech AI that I would love to get involved with creating/learning about how to develop and explore this technology; how it can be applied in real world settings by putting our data to work for us and used to improve our patient’s user experience and the overarching goal that Enhanced Fertility strives for.
I’m also excited to look into implementing different reporting metrics for the Doctor’s Portal admin dashboard – a vision of many informative and interactive graphs and metrics spanning a clean UI dashboard would lend itself to the sleek modern environment I know Enhanced Fertility to be. I once again extend my thanks to Enhanced Fertility for giving me the opportunity to develop my skills with them and I look forward to continuing working and striving to push them to the future!
Enhanced Fertility Programme was founded by Andreia Trigo RN BSc MSc, Fertility Nurse Consultant, giving you access to personalised fertility diagnostics and care.
