Expeedo

This was my first step into software development. Expeedo is a B2B e-commerce company, building shop software as well as individual e-commerce solutions for big companies. This was a small business, with a development team of up to 4. I started this role as part of a form of apprenticeship, the dual education program, which is common in Germany. As part of this I worked part time (3 days a week) at Expeedo, and went part time (2 days a week) to a special school learning the fundamentals of software engineering.

My Responsibilities

As a full stack developer my responsibilities included maintainance and further feature development of the core ecommerce software, a server side application written in an inhouse language, with a syntax based on C and PHP. I was also in charge of building new shops for our clients, including the frontend work using HTML, CSS, JS and jQuery (we were supporting browsers back to IE6 at the time, so jQuery was an absolute blessing and a good way to dive into JS development in my opinion).

Beyond that I was also responsible for customer support when it came to technical issues, being in direct contact with customers via phone and email to help them resolve any technical issues.

During my time at Expeedo I also pushed for and finally lead the re-design of the shop systems admin interface, modernising it from being purely SSR to using jQuery and AJAX (if JS is enabled, at the time everything had to be backwards compatible and working without any JS!) as well as giving the interface a new look and feel.

Overall I think starting in the industrie in a full stack role helped me a lot understanding all the different areas and gave me a pretty good overview of where I wanted to go from there on.

Technology

• BE development with inhouse language
• MySQL + text file based data storage
• HTML
• CSS
• JS
• jQuery
• git
• Linux (OS and server maintanance)
• direct client support