Meet Kristina Oksaite
Meet The Team:
Kristina Oksaite, Web Developer
Following the introduction of our ‘Meet the Team’ page comes our mini blog series. Hear personally from our team members about their roles at JUMP and more. Meet Kristina…
Tell us a bit about yourself
I’m a highly-motivated, goal-oriented 22-year-old born in Lithuania. I constantly set out new challenges for myself and persistently reach for them, despite my occasional clumsiness and random gravity checks (not tripping!).
Summarise your role at JUMP
As a new team-player at JUMP, so far I’ve been working on a few different large scale projects, familiarising myself with the way our programming team works and contributing to the work myself.
What got you into web development?
When I was 11, my mama encouraged me to go to a computing school for kids, where I spent a couple of years programming with Logo and creating visual animations. A few years later I joined that school again to learn more advanced programming (like C++) - this was also when I first interacted with web programming tools. The idea of writing code that silently functions and runs in a website behind the scenes really excited me, and made me realise what I want to do in the future. Soon after that, I was applying to Northumbria University to study Web Design and Development.
Describe the project you've worked on that you're proudest of. What did you do that worked out particularly well?
I am very proud of the e-learning website I had to build during my placement year. Being the only person assigned to this big project with a long list of requirements was certainly the biggest challenge I had faced by that point. I needed to do a lot of self-learning and research to ensure that the website functions as it should. The steepest learning curve was JavaScript React implementation which I had to use to make the e-learning more user-friendly and interactive. So, you can probably imagine the joy and satisfaction I felt when I successfully completed this project! Moreover, an additional bonus for this hard work was my dissertation project for university, which was inspired by the work I had done on the e-learning website.
What do you hope to achieve at JUMP?
Here at JUMP, I feel challenged as a web developer and welcomed as a team-player. So, I want to help this business grow by contributing to the team and to progress my programming skills by following best code practices and learning from the best.
What do you like most about web development/being a web developer?
I love that in web development there’s always something new to learn every day - it keeps you on your toes all the time, so it’s never boring! But there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing the final result of your hard work, when the job is successfully completed and the code is well-written.
Finally, what advice would you give to any junior developers starting out?
Still feeling as a junior developer myself, I know how overwhelming it can be at times. Facing new challenges and problems is a part of our everyday life. But I always remind myself to never give up and believe in myself. Programming isn’t about being a genius, or especially gifted. It’s about being curious and becoming an expert in doing thorough research (the internet community is there for support in every step of the way). You can do this! And if you can’t - sleep on it (works like a charm every time).