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1. Please tell us a bit about yourself, your background, what you do at Certua and outside of Certua.
I’m Vickie, and I am a Senior Developer in the UX team at Certua. I joined Certua in February 2021, when Certua merged with Brisk. Outside of Certua, I am the founder of the DevelopHER Awards, an annual awards ceremony in East Anglia to celebrate women in tech and create role models for the next generation.
Lastly, I am a keen paddleboarder, and you’ll often find me out paddling on the Norfolk Broads.
2. How did you end up working in a tech role?
When I finished my A Levels, I chose not to go to university, and instead was lucky to secure a role with a local Norwich company as a Junior Web Developer where I learnt everything on the job, and was well and truly thrown in the deep end. Since then, I’ve worked for a number of tech startups across a mixture of sectors and enjoy the challenges that each of them brings. I particularly enjoy using technology to shake up old fashioned industries.
3. What’s your team like at Certua and what do you work on?
In the UX team we have 5 Developers (soon to be 6!), a UX designer and are all managed by our CXO. Together we are responsible for building and maintaining Certua’s frontends and the UX API. We mainly work in Angular, and always strive to use the latest tools and technologies. We’ve built our embedded finance components using Microfrontends and Angular elements which means that they are super flexible and can be customised to work almost anywhere, in any look/feel. The UX API, is a .NET Core API and controls everything to do with the white labelling of our products and content management of the sites.
4. What made you start the DevelopHER Awards?
I attended a tech meetup when I first started working in tech and was shocked at the lack of women there. When I researched the stats, shockingly only 1 in 5 of those working in tech are women, and there were even bleaker figures in relation to women staying in the industry too. So I came up with the idea of an awards ceremony, with the aim of both celebrating the incredible women we already have working in tech, as well as shining a spotlight on the fantastic role models we have in the industry to help encourage the next generation to take up a career in tech.
5. How do you think we can encourage more women to work in tech?
I think it’s important that we challenge stereotypes of those working in tech, we’re not all recluses who spend hours coding in our bedrooms, and it’s important that we do more to ensure the world knows that. In addition we need to do more to showcase the phenomenal variety of roles that are available in tech, you could work in tech your whole life and never write a line of code.
6. Please describe Certua in 3 words
- Friendly
- Forward-thinking
- Flexible
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