Meet the IDR Team – Tom Owen – Senior Developer

I became a developer out of an interest in robotics. The field was relatively immature when I started my career and not ready to take on inexperienced graduates, so instead, I started working in a prototyping role before gradually moving into a series of roles in or around the finance industry. Although it’s an obvious industry for someone with my academic background (I read Mathematics at University College London) it wasn’t something I had planned. I was motivated by the opportunity to automate repetitive manual tasks which is what I see robotics as being all about (albeit more tangible tasks as opposed to information management tasks). 

We’ve had a large project re-vamping our user interface which I was heavily involved in when I joined. I’m now also working on our public API. This gives our clients the ability to programmatically perform tasks that would otherwise be done by users typing and clicking buttons in our user interface (in other words automating manual repetitive tasks!).   

No two days are the same, but the things that happen every day include reviewing work submissions by other developers, working on my own tasks and liaising with other technical employees to try to find the best way to solve problems or test and deploy features and bug fixes. In a nutshell, reading code, writing code and talking about code! 

I know they are clichés but “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” and “failing to plan is planning to fail”. Asking the right questions at the start of a project and having a good think about deliverable milestones avoids having to backtrack later.  

Know your own worth. Treat mistakes as learning opportunities, not failures. 

I like to take a break from my screens. Food is a passion, particularly eating cheese and playing the board game Settlers of Catan.