I’ve been running the development team within the web for a little over six months. Previously I was a Senior Developer on Teams for nearly six years after coming to work in Dundee from the University of Edinburgh’s Applications Division in 2017 (and before that from local government). I have a lot of experience in application development and project management within higher education, managing a team definitely adds layers, but luckily more like a cake and less like an onion that wants to make me cry!

What does the development team do?

So what do we actually do on the development team within web services? Development work is often seen as a mystery, but essentially most of the work we do is to support the delivery of content through the University website. We do this by improving, supporting and integrating Drupal (our content management system).

But working with Drupal isn’t all we do! We are also responsible for managing the infrastructure behind the website, the various WordPress blogs, integrations with core systems and constantly learning, improving, innovating and providing technical leadership to deliver new solutions for enable the rest of the web services and broader External Relations to achieve our core goals.

I’m really proud of the work we’ve done over the last few years delivering the new Drupal CMS. We are at the forefront of Drupal development using Docker and DDEV for local development along with an automated workflow via GitLab CI and an established agile approach to projects using GitLab issue tracking and Kanban boards.

Where are we going?

Over the next few months, we will be looking to introduce more automated testing into our workflow to make our deployments more robust and reduce the amount of human effort required for testing. We will also be looking to migrate from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 and complete the transition from the remaining on-premise infrastructure to have the website fully cloud based.

We have a lot of interesting work ahead of us and a strong team to make it happen. I look forward to sharing our progress and introducing you to the rest of the team here on the blog.