Natalie has been working at Sandfield since 2019 as a senior software developer. She was employed to work at Sandfield when she was still living in South Africa.
Natalie then immigrated with her family to New Zealand and has been with Sandfield ever since.
What do you do at Sandfield?
I've been at Sandfiled for three years now and I am a Senior Developer.
What do you enjoy most about being a senior developer?
I love that I do a wide variety of work, frontend, backend, and mobile development.
I also love mentoring new team members as it gives me a chance to teach them skills that they might not have learned at previous roles or university.
What have been some of your greatest accomplishments during your time here?
One of my greatest accomplishments at Sandfield would probably be building a Control Tower. A Control Tower is a visual dashboard of warehouse movements for Mainfreight, which aids them in planning. Another project I worked on was called Skeletons, which was a template that aided in creating default shipments for certain clients.
I have also been involved with onboarding new team members. I moved from South Africa to New Zealand to work for Sandfield so I know how intimidating it can be for new team members to join a new company. At Sandfield we like to make everyone feel welcome by offering a structured onboarding process that allows for senior developers to pass down their knowledge of both the systems that we work with as well as also getting to know the team on a more personal level.
What's one thing that surprised you about working at Sandfield?
I love that Sandfield has a great internal culture. The people are very social and also come from a diverse range of backgrounds which makes it a fun place to be. We work hard but play hard too, with loads of team building and social activities. Sandfield really cares about its team members and so we have activities such as Fun Food Fridays, whereby Sandfield puts on a spread of delicious food for the whole team to enjoy to kick start the weekend. It's activities like this that help develop friendships and I'm happy to say that I have made some lifelong friendships during my three years here!
What are your client relationships like? and How many clients do you work with?
I work for one client, Mainfreight. I have a great relationship with the Mainfreight team, I feel like they are an extension of our team. I feel a great sense of pride when I see Mainfreight’s trucks on the road as I feel like I have had a role to play in its success.
What are some of the tech that you use?
This answer is for all of the coders out there!
I work with asp.net, jquery, c#, and lots of SQL database work. Also, I am upskilling to React as we are in the process of upgrading to this. As you can see, we work with a range of different databases and tech stacks and so the variety makes every day interesting!
What's a hobby/passion you have outside of work?
I have 3 kids so that takes a lot of my time up outside of work as you can imagine. I also enjoy painting and adore cuddling my cats!
