Web Developer

The system

The Jamia Review is a student-run e-journal. I was on its web development team as a volunteer, alongside my degree and later alongside my first paid roles.

The site is a publishing tool before it is anything else: an editor needs to get a piece from draft to live without asking a developer. Most of what I did served that — the CMS and its templates, the article layout, and making the thing load acceptably on a phone on a student data plan. Around 300 pieces went out through it while I was involved.

What was hard

Handover. Volunteers graduate. Everything had to be operable by whoever arrived next, which is where I first wrote documentation somebody actually depended on. It is also why I stopped being clever in ways I could not explain in a paragraph.

Nobody is on call. No rota, no budget. That constrains what you are allowed to build: anything needing routine attention was the wrong answer, so the site is deliberately boring.

Editorial is a stakeholder. Writers and editors care about things developers do not — how a pull-quote sits, whether a byline reads correctly. Taking that as a requirement rather than a preference was a useful habit to learn early.

What I would do differently

I built a custom editor flow where the off-the-shelf one would have done. It was the more interesting thing to write, and it is the part that broke after I left.