My name is Alexa Gibson, and my job title is React Engineer. And the location I work at is Watermark in Livingston.

So I always say to people; when you phone the Contact Centre to speak to Sky about your Sky TV – what the agent uses is created by us.

I am a Front-End Javascript Engineer, and we use the React framework. We are building what you can see on the screen; so buttons, text, alert bars to alert you about something that you tried to do and can’t do.

What we have at the moment for the Contact Centre, we are now creating it for the new retail stores, so that was quite exciting to be involved in because it was something that Sky previously has never had.

We’re in the ‘Experience Clan’. We’re working really hard on accessibility, working with our User Experience teams to come up with a way that will really support our Contact Centre agents to use our application; being able to magnify the text, a dark mode, being able to change the colours on screen.

Everybody’s different, everyone’s unique, everyone sees things differently. So it’s something I’m very keen on. We’re working really hard as a team. We’re really pushing the accessibility, because we know that we need to get the best for everyone to be able to do their job.

Within our Scrum Team, we have Analysts, QA Testers and Developers as well. We have planning sessions, where we look at all the work that’s coming up. We’ve got refinement sessions, where we work with the Analysts to break down stories; what is it we want to deliver?  Especially anything we could improve on, whether it’s as a team or perhaps in the department.

Scrum Masters are always extremely supportive to help make positive changes. Everybody’s ideas are included, we work really well together, we have lots of opportunities to meet up.

We have good chances to get to know everybody. Develop relationships; talk about what we’ve watched on TV! Everybody gets the opportunity to bring a bit forward from what they know or what they like.

When I started at Sky a couple of years ago, I was just stepping into coding at the time having had done another career elsewhere. It was great to be in an industry where I was looking at code all day. We’re quite cutting edge in our approaches – there’s always lots of opportunities to go and find out more.

The Senior Developer, a Principal Engineer and I are called ‘The UI Guys’! And that’s where we talk about things that are up-and-coming in the world of UI design and create things that are quite fancy, different, or new. I’m really keen to learn new things.

The best benefit? I’m sure everybody will say the same thing; free Sky TV! I use it all the time. And obviously there were opportunities to test out Sky Glass when it came out as well – but I’m quite happy with my Sky Q box at the moment!