Why Crowd? When someone says this to me, they’re effectively asking, why pick a company with a small close-knit team full of people who are inclusive and smiley, people who love to laugh but also work diligently and efficiently? You could look all over and never find a workplace more inviting than Crowd.
As someone who is at least ten years younger than the rest of the employees, I was walking into the building for my first work experience; worried that I would be patronised, looked down upon, and seen as a large burden to the rest of the team – little did I know it was going to be completely different.
I was met by people with similar interests, very friendly faces, and within a day I’d fallen for the place. It was amazing to find a place that followed my passion for computing and also contained one of the most wonderful atmospheres you could ever find.
I came to digital marketing agency; Crowd with little to no experience in any coding languages that dealt with web development. Even though this should probably have been a problem for my work experience here, Crowd took it in their stride and gave me as much time and help as I needed to learn what I needed.
It didn’t end there. As soon as I finished the course I was following in HTML and CSS (two coding languages) I was given my task for the week: design and prototype a global internal communications system for the company.
At first it, sounded very daunting and near impossible, but with the assistance of Matt, Ralph, and Nathan we developed paper prototypes for our project which were then tested by the rest of the UK team, whose feedback was key to the user experience of the project.
Although it’s disheartening to hear your work is not absolutely flawless, I learned a lot about proportion and other design principles to craft an effective experience. After acting upon feedback and iterating on our paper prototypes, we got onto the meat and bone of the topic: coding it.
Using my new knowledge of HTML and CSS, I quickly prototyped key interactive functionality with the helpful assistance of Matt. We broke it down bit-by-bit, developing small bits at a time until Matt decided we were ready to try and make something quite challenging by ourselves: a masonry layout. Nathan and I spent a while thinking of ways to do this before finally coming upon a solution and the rewarding feeling of managing to do it was amazing and really fired up my passion for programming and development.
Towards the end of my week, Ralph gave me an extra challenge and set me loose to work on an animation task. This was, by far, the most challenging experience, because I also had to use JavaScript, which I didn’t have much experience with. After a lot of hard work and confusion, I finally came out with a splendid result that I am extremely proud of.
Looking to the future, I can already tell that my experience at Crowd will help me so much in every way imaginable. I have managed to learn the foundations of two new languages, grappled with another, and tackled a production task. If you had said this to me one week ago, I would’ve laughed and said it wasn’t possible but Crowd made it possible. I don’t think I can ever forget my absolutely wonderful experience at this absolutely wonderful place.
14 years old with a keen interest in all things computer and creative.
I make science puns. Periodically.
