It has been confirmed that the new Developer Lead will start working with us next month.  It should be interesting as neither myself or our other two application developers have met the applicant, so we are not sure what skill level he will have.

The other two developers have come up through the company and gained their skills along the way. Our senior developer (JA) came through the buying and merchandising department, starting with VBA in MS Excel, then VB6 and on to VB & C#.Net, while (PB) has come through from Logistics and I'm not sure his precise skill route, but he also codes in VB & C#.Net. Myself, I came into the company two years ago with basically only classic ASP and a whole lot of keeness to learn. I believe the other senior developer we had before he left also learned on the job too at another major uk clothing retailer, before joining NewLook.

As JA has so rightly pointed out, when the new guy turns up it will be good to see how our self taught standards and practices and skill levels stack up against a true professional from the industry. He has been programming in an OO approach for a fair few years and is very methodical and tends to follow some strict practices. For myself and PB it's only been a couple years that we have been programming in an OO approach. As a team, we have recently started to look into dependency injection and inversion of control, and JA is keen for our current project to utilise Spring.Net. We are hoping that the new chap can shed some light on if our intended development path is where the industry is going or if we are missing the point be a country mile.