I work at new mind | tellUs, a company that designs, builds and hosts tourism destination websites through the UK and Europe - built using a custom CMS and populated with product data using an in-house "Destination Management System".
I am the Team Lead for the CMS Team, which has three main areas of responsibility;
Use data from the CMS and DMS (and some third party services) to render a million page view a day quickly and efficiently (fairly vanilla C# code that is designed and tuned to work at scale).
Make new features for the websites, helping ensure that new websites have exciting differentiators to keep the tourism destination clients excited about what their neighbours are doing and looking forward to opening their wallet for useful features mid-cycle or when they renew their contracts (often a lot of JavaScript).
Progressively rewrite the custom CMS interface since its code base is regrettably beyond saving (you had a good run, decade-old unstructured ASP application, but your days are numbered) and there is no realistic migration route for the hundreds of existing sites onto any off-the-shelf CMS (even if there were, a lot of work would be required to integrate as well with our DMS as we can with a custom solution). It's a modern, snappy-feeling single page application written using the React library and in C# by using Bridge.NET to translate that C# into JavaScript.
My job has a great mix of research and guiding the technical direction of the company while also being very hands-on and writing a lot of code (not to mention planning, spec'ing and mentoring).
By night, I do more coding and writing, much of which you can read about on my blog: www.productiverage.com. I'm particularly interesting in the topics "performance" and "writing code that is unambiguous and expresses intent as clearly as possible". These are often seen as conflicting goals but that needn't be the case most of the time!
