The last few months have been pretty hectic for us, with plenty of services making the transition to the customer-focussed new.shropshire.gov.uk, along with revamps of council related websites and some behind-the-scenes maintenance of our infrastructure.
We've also had a few of our team move onto pastures new during this time, and because of the workload we've not had a chance to carry out our usual Project WIP tradition and write their "farewell" posts. So, to make up for this, it is their valuable contribution to our team that I want to bring to light in this post.
Luca Colella
Luca joined us in September 2014, undertaking a 48 week placement as part of his sandwich degree at Staffordshire University. Always willing to get involved and learn new skills, Luca started out by rolling up his sleeves and delving into the content editing process before bringing his coding skills to the fore and playing a big part in the upcoming revamp of our current intranet. He slotted seamlessly into the team with his knowledge of obscure books, TV shows and movies, not to mention his ability to disturb Dan with random shirt stroking. Luca's last day was the 31st July, which left him a month to recover before heading back to the lectures, tests and coursework of his final year.
Florent Mauer
Florent is also a degree student, this time studying at the Université de Lorraine in France, which required him to undertake a work placement as part of his course. Intially working in our IT service for a few weeks, he then came over to us mid-June, and spent his remaining time working on WordPress builds and the Umbraco side of the intranet revamp. Like Luca, Florent's willingness to get involved and learn new techniques was a great help to both IT and ourselves in Digital Services. Following his placement with us, which finished towards the end of July, Florent had to put together a presentation for his tutors and myself (which I attended via Skype), to demonstrate the skills and experiences he picked up. We are quite proud that Florent's tutors have given high praise to what he has learnt during his time with us.
Mike Sheridan
As one of our developers, and author of a couple of posts here on Project WIP (his first, and his last), Mike was another valuable member of our team. Thrown in at the deep end with Umbraco, he picked things up incredibly quickly, and was able to churn out new templates and ideas for new.shropshire.gov.uk like an ex-Navy Seal fighting off terrorists on a boat (had to throw in a Steven Seagal reference for his sake).
An avid football fan, his spare time was spent providing photos and reports on Telford United matches, which led to him deciding to follow his dream and study journalism as a full-time student. To prepare him for embracing the student lifestyle, the gifts we gave him on his last day with us (the 30th September) were a student cookbook and a can of energy drink to help him through his studies.
We won't say goodbye...
... instead we'll wish them all good look in their academic endeavours, and, to use a phrase that Florent may appreciate, we'll say "au revoir"!