Meet the Clickers – Kieran Brown

Welcome back to another episode of Meet the Clickers!

This week I caught up with one of our award winning tech programmers, Kieran Brown!

Hiya Kie! How are we mate? Good to catch up. Could you tell the readers at home when you joined Click?

“Alright mate! Yeah I’m great ta shug, I joined click just under 2 years ago, 3rd October 2016 to be precise. I’d recently moved to Stoke-on-Trent and needed a local place to work, it all fell into place beautifully.”

Nice one! Could you now tell us a bit about your current role within the business?

“Sure buddy, I joined Click as part of the new product team, I’ve been working very closely with Mr. Steve Deighton developing some ace products. One that can’t go without a mention that I’m sure you’re all familiar with by now is Click Dealer’s award winning product – ClickEngage.

While Steve focuses more on colouring in, I play a part in developing Web API’s. Now I’ve really struggled to explain what this is so I’m going to leave you with this top description from Google.

“a set of functions and procedures that allow the creation of applications which access the features or data of an application”

Giving an example from ClickEngage, the API allows the ability to enquire, store the part exchange and get a valuation, reserve, arrange a callback, receive emails/sms etc.”

Hahaha, thanks for clearing that up, you’d lost me there. If you could choose one person to be your mentor, who would it be and why?

“Taylor Otwell, a name that probably won’t mean anything to anybody reading this, is the founder of a popular PHP Framework – Laravel/Lumen. As sad as it is my entire life revolves around programming and without this guy the applications I have developed wouldn’t be as they are today.

He’s a big inspiration to a lot of developers and his efforts have definitely made me a better programmer. Big up.”

What are your 3 favourite video games of all time?

“This is a tough one, I’m not as big into gaming as I used to be but I can definitely name 3, all quite recently released/played actually.”

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• God of War

What is the hardest thing you have ever done?

“I guess mentally, living with university students for 2 years while trying to get up fresh for a 9am start. I can’t even remember the amount of sleepless nights and hungover days. Although on the other side I was living the dream, university life while earning plenty of dolla!”

What is your proudest achievement in life so far?

“My proudest achievement so far has to be having a massive part in the development of an award winning product in such early stages of my programming career. It’s not everyday you’re given the opportunity to develop a product from scratch that thousands of consumers get to use.”

For sure Kie, you’ve all definitely smashed it with ClickEngage. Favourite Netflix series of all time?

“I’ve only had Netflix for 2 months so I’ve not quite scraped the surface of content yet! But I’m quite into psychological series, especially horror, so I’d have to say Hannibal.

My favourite series of all time however would have to be Game of Thrones, team Night King!”

If you were a dictator of a small nation, what crazy dictator stuff would you do?

“Finish what my grandfather started…”

What is worth spending more on to get the best?

“Everything, I’m absolutely terrible with money. Being a techy I would have to say anything hardware related, you buy cheap you buy again. My other half would probably disagree though, I’m not quite sure she agreed with buying a £1500 TV, which then obviously needed a high spec sound-bar to go with it.”

Haha, brilliant. Last but not least, what do you love most about working at Click?

“Other than the absolute obvious, the clickers themselves, there’s countless reasons. There’s freedom in development. The attitude, willingness and creativity of employees and everybody’s ideas are always welcomed!

But the main thing I love about Click, is the support and investment you get from the business. Click Dealer invest in their staff more than any other business I’ve seen. One example is having access to unlimited training resources through what we call ClickAcademy! We get personal development time fortnightly on a friday afternoon to further develop ourselves which gives us the opportunity to improve or learn something new!

The banter between Austin and Shane, 2 other tech team members, is also quite enjoyable to listen to.”

What a fantastic answer! Probably the best one we’ve had so far so kudos to you for that Kie.

Well Kieran, as always a big thank you for taking some time out of your day to get involved in Meet the Clickers, I hope you enjoyed it! As for everyone reading at home, I hope you all enjoyed the latest instalment of our series, the next addition will be out this time next week but if that’s too long to wait, please click here to check out our other episodes.