Episode 58 of Meet the Clickers sees us meet one of five Jamie’s at Click! I sat down with Jamie Peters this week to discuss his detest for WordPress and love of Portuguese chicken!
Hi Jamie, I hope you’re well! How did you start at Click Dealer?
Hi Alex, I’m fine thanks. It all started a little over a year ago, I’d been self employed as a web designer for a couple of years, and in December 2017 me and my fiancée started talking about our plans for the future, the money we were earning wasn’t enough for us to get our own place or anything, so I decided to start looking for a full-time job.
In January 2018 I applied for a job with the web team, got interviewed by Ollie, Will and Keiran Munn, and in the interview we talked about my PHP skills, so they passed me onto Shaun, I had an interview with him a week later, and then started in the Tech team the Monday after that, which also involved moving to my fiancée’s parent’s house in Crewe full-time from my parents’ in South Yorkshire, rather than just stopping there every few weeks!
How has your role changed since you joined us?
When I originally started I was in the Tech Maintenance team, working closely with Graeme, Austin and Jen with changing or fixing little things on the DMS for our dealers. In April/May I had my first big task of creating something new for the DMS, the GDPR dashboard. From then on I’ve been on the projects team, developing new exciting functionality for the DMS, such as Click Leads in the new Accelerator Pack, launching in March. I’ve also worked on functionality for Making Tax Digital and submitting your VAT Return through the DMS.
What do you have against WordPress?
Haha, how long have you got? My main gripe with WordPress started when I was self-employed, unfortunately these days the market is saturated with build your own solutions, such as Wix, Go Daddy, WordPress, which small, new businesses use rather than having a customised website, then there’s the whole market of people who sell themselves as “expert” web designers/developers who just hack together a paid for WordPress theme and a few plugins and sell it off to a client at an inflated ridiculous price, whereas every website I did, I created from the ground up.
When you look at code behind WordPress, its such a mess, there’s no modern coding standards or technologies, it supports out of date versions of PHP out of the box, and if you install the wrong plugins or don’t keep it up to date, it’s a huge security risk.
Done properly, I’ve got nothing against WordPress, I have seen some great WordPress websites and I know people who make decent money creating and selling bespoke custom WordPress plugins, it’s the other end of the spectrum I have issues with!
At least you can back your views up! Favourite Food?
Nando’s. I love a cheeky Nando’s, I’d eat at a Nando’s restaurant every week if I could, I even get their spice packs from the supermarkets and cook my own chicken in it at home if I really fancy one, which is usually a couple of times a week!
We’re huge fans of spicy chicken in the Marketing department too! What fictional place would you most like to visit?
I’m not sure really, I love the Star Wars universe, but I couldn’t pick one place there to visit, there’s so many! I’m also a huge fan of the Harry Potter books, so Hogwarts would be cool, and I love The Big Bang Theory, so maybe I’d go to Pasadena and visit the apartment and meet Sheldon Cooper and everyone else, it’s a tough question!
Some great ideas there, they all sound interesting! What skill would you like to completely master?
Being a techy and a web dev guy, my first thought was Web Development, who doesn’t want to master their own craft? But Web Dev is an ever changing, ever evolving industry, an industry standard now could be completely out of date in six months time, it’s an impossible trade to master.
My other love is playing guitar, I’ve got a sweet Epiphone Les Paul at home that my other half got me for my birthday last year. I love playing guitar, I’ve been playing just over nine years, people tell me I’m good, but I’m good at playing other people’s songs, not writing my own or anything. I’d love to master the guitar though, play solos like Slash, write amazing songs, play on a stage to other people; that’s the dream!
It sounds like you and Steve Connor would make quite the partnership, we just need a drummer and we’ve got a Click band! What’s something everyone is completely obsessed with that you don’t get the point of?
There’s a lot of popular culture I don’t like, a prime example is Game of Thrones It’s huge, and I hear people talking about it regularly, but I just don’t like it, I like fantasy, I read every day on the train to and from work, but I like stories that are semi-grounded in reality, and set in the modern day, Game of Thrones just doesn’t interest me at all.
Can’t argue with that! Would you rather live in the city or the countryside and why?
I like both for different reasons, but I’d like to throw in a third option, the coast. I absolutely love being by the sea, whether that’s a beach, or a cliff top, a hustle and bustle sea side town full of tourists, or a remote cliff top in the middle of nowhere, put me in either, no matter the weather, and I can sit there for hours watching the world go by, watching the water, and just not get bored.
Top answer, there’s something special about the seaside. What do you really want but can’t afford?
I love Lego, I see all these cool Star Wars Lego sets, and Harry Potter Lego sets, and I just want them all, all of the decent ones are ridiculously expensive, and of course it’s having the room to put them. When me and my partner finally get our own place, I’d love a room just full of Lego, and probably guitars and amps too, somewhere for me to just to have fun.
I can’t think of a better use for a spare room! What would you like to know more about?
Since I’ve been at Click I’ve learnt a lot from Kieran Brown, he’s great at what he does, and he’s got a great mindset when it comes to development, standards, good practices and stuff like that. Over the past six months or so I’ve been really trying to up my game and be the best I can be at what I do, challenge myself to learn more and get out of the bad coding habits I’ve been in for 10, 15 years. So, the more I do, the more I learn, and the more I improve.
What do you love most about working at Click?
I love everything about being here, it’s a great company, with a great workspace, and all the people are great. Here in the Tech team we have a lot of laughs and banter and we all get on great with each other, as I said before, I’ve learnt a lot while being here, there’s progression here, and the managers can see that you want to learn more and give you more challenging work to do. Like I said at the start, I went for the Web job, and then ended up in the Tech Team, and then progressed into the projects team after just a few months of being here, and now I’ve had a part in building fantastic new features for our dealers.
The directors are great too, late last year something awful happened in my fiancée’s family, and I had both Pippa R and Ollie, and even other managers asking how we were, offering their support.
It’s great to be part of a family run business, which in the 12 months I’ve been here has progressed so much, I always tell myself I dropped incredibly lucky getting a job at Click, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
You’re not wrong Jamie, Click really is one of a kind!
If you enjoyed this week’s episode of Meet the Clickers and want to find out more, read our previous episodes here. If you’re up to date, make sure you come back next week for a new instalment!
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