主播大秀

Former Extendee Ben Mustill-Rose has had a jam packed year at the 主播大秀 working in software development and he shares with us his highlights.

It's hard to believe that at the time of writing I've been at the 主播大秀 for just over a year. I've dealt with many varied and unexpected challenges, but looking back on my experiences so far, I can genuinely say that I've enjoyed every one of them and wouldn't change a thing if I had the chance.

I joined the 主播大秀 in October 2015 working as a trainee developer in test (DIT) for mobile iPlayer. The role of a DIT is to act as an enabler for the various people within a team, which usually translates as a bit of development, testing and 'devops' (think system administration) but this barely scratches the surface of what you can find yourself doing.

I'm really glad I chose to start my career being a DIT - you get given real responsibilities in the form of looking after products and servers, and there's always an opportunity to build something yourself as we're always looking to improve our tooling. For example I have been doing some incredibly interesting work reverse-engineering parts of Android and iOS for some internal software and hope to be in a position where some of this can be open sourced before the end of the year.

One of the things about the 主播大秀 that I learnt very quickly was that there are always plenty of opportunities to do things with other teams in addition to your main role. Here are just some of the things that I've been doing that I didn't expect to do when I started:

• Help build the
• Help out 主播大秀 Children’s with one of their
• Give user experience advice to a handful of different iPlayer teams - a highlight for me was getting my hands on our and getting some fairly big user interface changes in
• Give technical and accessibility advice to the team
• Help create a
• Run events at the 主播大秀 as a Science, Technology Engineering and Maths
• Help run coding workshops
• Design indoor navigation systems
• Design systems for autonomous drone control

Regarding accessibility I'd be lying if I said that everything has been plain sailing. My team are users of a specialist coding language which is essentially unusable with a screen reader. We're also heavy Mac users and whilst the built-in screen reader works really well with some applications, its terminal support is poor which makes using programs like Vi next to impossible for example.

It is worth pointing out that we do have a dedicated access services department who are able to supply and support various pieces of assistive technologies and support you when applying to access to work when you first start.

If you're thinking of applying to one of our new talent schemes through the , first and foremost I'd suggest that you put aside any reservations you may have and just give it a go. If you are offered a place, I would encourage you to really embrace the opportunity with both hands (I know that's a massive cliché) and do as many different things as possible - when I was on my placement my attitude was that I would say yes to everything by default and only turn something down if it clashed with something in my main role.

This job is my first since graduating. My CV was incredibly average. I had very little relevant experience but for some reason I was given a chance. I'll end the post with another cliché, but I really mean it when I say that it could be you!

You can apply for one of our technology schemes