Jake joined Tillo in May 2024, joining our UX/UI Team, who make sure our products look incredible and are super easy to use.
We sat down with Jake to find out more about his role, and how he got into it!
When did you start coding, and what got you into it?
I started coding when I was only 13/14 years old, or thereabouts. My family didn't have a personal computer at the time, so my only access to the internet was at school. At this time we were mostly being taught how to use programs like PowerPoint and Excel, but I wasn't all that interested.
I spent my IT lessons learning how to decode Flash games (essentially break them out into their base components), so that I could modify them, and learn how they were put together. At the time I didn't know it, but ActionScript (the language used by Flash) is based on the same specifications that JavaScript and subsequently TypeScript are based on, which are the languages I have since been using day-to-day professionally for many years.
I think I ended up failing my IT GCSE because I didn't do any of the coursework - I spent all my time teaching myself to code, and I guess it paid off in the long run.
What is your favourite thing about your role?
Although I have experience as a full-stack engineer (handling both the user interfaces that people see, and the data behind the scenes) I've always really enjoyed the frontend side of things. It's incredibly satisfying to create user interfaces that both look aesthetically pleasing, and are easy to understand and utilize (UX - user experience).
Besides making things as nice as we can for our users, another big thing for me is the DX (developer experience) - how do we make code that's easy to understand, and allows our engineers to create features and or fix bugs as swiftly as they can.
What made you want to work at Tillo?
Almost my entire professional career has been working at software agencies, where clients come to us with an idea, we build it out, and then we (mostly) give it away for them to take to market and/or for their own engineering teams to maintain. I've never really had the opportunity to "own" a project, help advance it over time, and see its impact to the users.
I joined Tillo, in part, because I wanted to work for a product company, where I can help grow the business over time, improve both the user and developer experiences, and see the feedback from all my hard work.
Can you tell us about a project you’re currently working on?
I am the Lead Engineer within the relatively new UX/UI team - a team composed entirely of designers and frontend engineers. Our biggest focus at the moment is the "hub refresh".
This consists of design and frontend working closely to redesign and rebuild the frontend of our main app, creating nicer user experiences and including features like internationalization (translations/multi-language support), multiple themes (including a dark mode), and more.
What are you excited about in your future at Tillo?
I am excited to be pushing for and building code that is more reusable and ultimately simpler, eventually leading to a standard stack of components and utilities that we can use across all of our products. Writing code that is complex but not complicated is hard, and it's incredibly rewarding when you're able to produce tools that engineers enjoy working with.
What advice would you give to someone looking to progress in their career as an Engineer?
Look in the source code. Whatever library/framework you are using, find their repository on GitHub (or wherever) and have a look at how that thing is structured, what patterns they use, what the magic behind the curtains really is.
Controversially I would also suggest: don't look in the source/don't follow tutorials - try to recreate something that exists by figuring out the "how" yourself, and only once you've either got something that works, or you're incredibly stuck, should you look up how others have solved these problems before.
You may be surprised to find that the way you've solved the problem is the same as how others have, but there's a chance you found a better way, and that's super rewarding. Either way, learning from experimentation in addition to looking at how others have solved similar problems is a very eye-opening experience.
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Looking for your next engineering role? Tillo is hiring!
As Tillo continues to scale and evolve, we’re looking for new software engineers to join our growing engineering team 🚀
To find out more, visit our Careers page, or if you’d rather jump right to it, check out our current vacancies here.
