Duncan Nicoll

Stepping into this role was an exciting challenge, taking the knowledge and skills I had built in the main Archive Services team and operating at a higher level, driving the technical direction for the next stages of the product.

I joined the Archive Services team during its initial formation and started working on the completion of existing metadata importers. My role, responsibility and involvement quickly grew and I am proud to have been part of so many different aspects of the small team.

In stepping up to lead the full backend team, I was met with many different types of challenges. Although I still had an active role in writing features and improving systems for the STV Player, my time was also shared across all aspects of managing the team. From facilitating PDRs, managing resources to things such as participating in high-level long term team planning sessions.

As well as overseeing the entire team, due to changes in staff, I also had the task of bringing a brand new STV Player backend team up to speed. I thoroughly enjoy skill sharing and code, systems and technologies discussions so found this very rewarding.

I thoroughly enjoyed taking charge of the Player project from a backend perspective and pushing things forwards in the direction I believe things should be moving in. In particular, increasing usage of AWS where appropriate, such as in improving the systems related to ingest of 3rd party provided video assets and metadata, gathering stats about live streams, providing simple API endpoints for small services and aiding with CI/CD.

Often I was required to make internal tooling for other departments. I really enjoyed this as it gave me the chance to flex my skills in technologies and languages that I didn't typically get to use day to day.

Whilst still mainly working on the STV Player and all things related to it, one of the responsibilities my position as a Lead gave me was managing a team and overseeing a stream of work. Although the team I managed was small, I enjoyed the new responsibilities the role provided. It pushed me forward and encouraged me to grow and I feel that I supported my team very well in their personal development as well as contributing to a stream of work that I didn't have a direct involvement in.

My work continued with the STV Player and I took ownership of a few large systems worked on. One such part was the Metadata system which facilitates the manipulation of the data from the CMS into metadata files which are then ingested by the always growing list of 3rd party platforms. I developed an in-depth knowledge of the various 3rd party platforms and how their systems work and thoroughly enjoyed progressing the Metadata system in order to best deliver the required information which directly benefits the consumer.

I enjoyed working with our various teams as they developed new features for the STV Player on all it's many devices. I feel that my constant interest in new technologies and their uses really aided this along with my ability to rapidly prototype. I enjoy learning from others and taking time to understand someone's point of view, especially revolving around technologies that I do not immediately have experience in. I am passionate about skill sharing and all the many benefits surrounding it.

My involvement with other activities outside of my normal tasks continued to grow and I thoroughly enjoyed every opportunity I got. I gave presentations about STV and the development team at universities, carried out several interviews and tests as part of the recruitment process and continued my involvement with the STV Children's Appeal.

Whilst I worked on various projects at STV, such as the General Election sub-site and improving the registration features of the site, my main stream of work was for all things STV Player related. I worked with the rest of the Player team to develop new features as per the business specifications and improve the existing codebase where appropriate. I would regularly work closely with the Frontend and Mobile teams to aid them with any Player features they would be working on.

Continually pushing myself forward, I would both adapt to and learn new and unfamiliar technologies to ensure that my skills were constantly improving and feed that back into any work undertaken.

I also thoroughly enjoyed becoming involved in other activities within the company, be it working with a visiting school group, aiding and promoting STV at a jobs fair, talking about the technologies used in the backend of the STV Player to a large group at an AWS Event in Edinburgh or getting massively involved in all aspects of the STV Children’s Appeal (be it giving up my free time to aid with some donation collection in buckets, singing Christmas songs at Silverburn or leading a group of my colleagues up a munro to raise money for The Appeal).

I was promoted to Lead Backend Developer after a year at Alienation Digital and whilst continuing the normal project work I also oversaw the Backend Development team and it’s direction.

Working on a multitude of projects for clients. Mainly utilising Joomla but frequently writing bespoke components and extensions as well as managing deployments and servers.

Actively developing the RAR site, adding new features, functions, sections. Providing technical support to customers.

Consulting and developing on several sites.

Developing several sites, projects

This is a bespoke service to compliment the Stiltify tool that tracks all the donations for a given campaign in order to facilitate the Stumpt team running their giveaways.

Using Deno along with the Deno KV service accelerated the development of this and made for an enjoyable developer experience.

A small tool that was built for the 2024 charity event to allow a few members of the Stumpt team to allow their Christmas tree lights to react to events driven by donations. A simple interface allowed them to pick what scene to display by default, when a donation larger than $25 is made and when they hit their fundraising goal. A webhook subscription was setup in Tiltify which posted any donations events to a custom secure endpoint which in turn passed that information along via Server-Sent Events to the bespoke application that controlled the Christmas lights.

I was approached by one of the founders of Tiltify to quickly put together a simple donation progress bar for a large charity event which featured several well-known celebrities. Whilst it was a tight time-scale, given it was a simple design, it was straight-forward to implement.

The event was huge success and raised over $60,000 and it was fun to see my work below several big stars.

Josh from Intelligame approached me to develop an idea he had for a zine-reader focused on games and their impact on us and society for the fun Playdate handheld console. This lead to a exciting challenge in building an app to facilitate this as I hadn't developed for the Playdate previously and whilst being aware of Lua, hadn't extensively written in it.

In building the Ignition app for the Playdate, I developed a zine editor to create content for the app. This was initially to help me develop the app, to have content to render and display, but as time progressed I found value in the tool and developed it into a fully fledge online editor. It allows you to preview your articles on a virtual Playdate, it stores all article data locally and can generate a download of your articles which can be easily loaded into the Ignition app.

I was approached by friends who run a small design partnership to aid them in their exhibition they were making for the RSPB. The focus was informing people about the efforts to save Scotland's corncrakes through advocacy, land management and education. The goal for my involvement was a small, fun but educational game that informed the exhibition visitor about the best corncrake conservation practices when mowing grass/crops in fields. This was an exciting challenge to put my interest in game development into practice and resulted in a fun end result that travelled with the exhibition.