It’s been a crazy couple of months at LegRoom. Welcoming new staff, a project manager heading to Europe for a wedding (it has been absolute chaos without you, Nick!), and a tonne of new projects being thrown into the ring; we’ve barely had time to breathe. And just as things begin to wind down, we find ourselves on the cusp of yet another frantic period. The ups and downs of agency life, eh?!
During these busy periods I often find myself taking over a lot of the QA – something I love! Coming from a design background, it allows me to pick up a lot of bugs that a non-designer might miss (you’d be surprised how quickly I can spot something being misaligned by a single pixel!), and it gives me a chance to analyse how different developers interpret the briefs we’re supplied by our clients. It’s a really good chance for me to get inside the developer’s heads and try to understand what drew them to use X animation for a certain section of the design, rather than Y animation in another.
As an agency, we set ourselves apart from the competition with our ability to produce pixel perfect designs time and time again – it’s incredibly rare to find anyone that is capable of producing designs exactly as a designer expects (a freelancer, an agency, an outsourced organisation… a-n-y-o-n-e). But we do it in the masses, day in, day out.

It’s really great to be part of a team that takes so much pride in what they do – I don’t think I’d last as a developer in a team that don’t put this much love and care into their work. I’d never be comfortable sending something off to a client (especially of this calibre) if I know it’s not perfect. It’s a huuuge relief that the agency shares the same beliefs!
This dev thing is hard, I tell ya. Although I’m finding that things are beginning to stick more and more, I do find myself stressing out as time goes on – I’m a stickler for processes and ensuring that I do things the right way (or the right way by LegRoom’s standards), so when it comes to something like development, when there are so many ways to do things, I don’t quite know how to approach it all.
My first official project is right around the corner, and although I’m not going to be working on it in it’s entirety from beginning to end, I’m incredibly excited to see a project I’ve worked on go live.
It’s so intimidating, though – the team seems to know exactly what to do in every situation, and seem to have so much knowledge packed into their brains without needing to frantically Google everything. It’s beginner’s nerves, for sure – there’s so much that I want and need to learn, but one can only learn so quickly! Passion and patience, young Padawan!

I’ll be tweeting more about my journey over on my personal Twitter (@murphytrueman) – let’s share our experiences and chat all things dev!