Overview
Starting at Cortex in 2021 as a developer, Danny has since grown into the role of delivery lead. In his current position, he guides junior staff members and oversees the delivery of Cortex’s suite of software products. As Danny celebrates his 3-year anniversary at Cortex this April, we took the chance to ask him 3 questions about his experience. It also took about 3 minutes to complete, but that theme started to take on some connotations we’d sooner avoid.
What’s an unexpected skill you’ve developed?
When I initially started at Cortex, my focus was on what I would consider “pure software” tasks such as bug fixing and feature development. Our core suite of [products] have reached a dev maturity, so currently, much of the focus is on tackling something brand new in areas to do with resilience and managing software in the wild! I’ve had to dive into areas like infrastructure, cloud hosting, caching, data management at scale, DevOps, and more.
What’s an area of your job you’d like to learn more about?
I’ve recently enjoyed doing a deep dive into lower-level technology like Rust, where it’s important to consider the efficiency and complexity of how you’re approaching solutions. I’m particularly interested in how I can bring that through to our existing projects to see if we can make certain functionalities faster, use less memory or reduce the amount of code required to achieve it. We will be flipping back to more active development soon and I’m looking forward to getting stuck back into some hardcore code problems.
What do you like most about Cortex’s culture?
I’ve never worked somewhere I could be so unabashedly myself; in previous roles, I’ve felt like I had to hold something back. I can’t think of many other places that wouldn’t bat an eyelid at me wearing shorts (almost) all year round!
By Sophie Lucassen
We popped “Passionate about building seamless brand experiences with a human-centred, creative, and tech-forward mindset” in to Google Translate and it told us that meant Sophie is right gooder at marketing stuff which is good because we have lots of crap and we’re stuff at marketing it.
Or words to that effect. Sophie joins us as our first non-developer-person (albeit with an active interest in learning what we do) which could easily a tear a hole in the delicate Cortex-space-time-continuity. Which is pretty exciting!