Meet Pieter - Our back-end circle lead

Meet Pieter Mouton, our back-end circle lead. In this insight, Pieter dives into the essentials of his role and shares some personal details about his journey at Endare.

How did you first cross roads with Endare?

I met Endare in the middle of the covid pandemic. While I loved my previous job, I was looking for a job closer to my hometown combined with a new professional challenge.

Endare was looking for a Laravel back-end developer, the framework in which I thrive.

Besides that, Endare also offers lots of perks like working both from home and in the office, flexible hours and plenty of opportunities to further deepen my professional skills. I eventually started working at Endare in May 2021.

What does being a Back-end circle lead entail?

It basically means I lead the monthly back-end meetup organised on Friday-afternoons.

During a circle meeting, we physically meet up at the office to explore new technologies and share knowledge with colleagues.

As a back-end developer I mainly focus on development in PHP and Laravel. Most of the time, I spend my time building API-based applications. In addition to this, I also like to do some frontend development from time to time. This means I’m also working on modern monolithic applications in Laravel, Vue and Inertia.

Before a project team is being formed, personal interests are taken into consideration. So depending on the skills and interests, a developer works on a certain project. This means we also have developers that keep their focus on back-end projects only.

Do you have any advice for starting developers?

Go and explore a multiple technologies, but also try to build in-depth knowledge of a couple of technologies.

For example, I like back-end development so my main focus was in-depth knowledge of Laravel. Besides that, I explored front-end tools like Angular and Vue. I’ve built apps with Ionic and I’ve used Livewire for building modern monolithic applications.

One more thing: start after-hour side projects. Your technical knowledge increases very quickly if you create things on top of your daily job. In addition, there is immense satisfaction in building and deploying applications that are used by many people.

Could you name some things you learned in 2023?

Personally I've had the chance to further develop my professional skills in terms of being an analyst. This is something valuable I would like to combine more with my development job. Analysing requirements and translating them to user stories with effort estimates.

I've also started using Github Copilot and it really changed the way I write code. It's remarkable to see how far the technology has come to support my daily workflow!