Meet Team Testomato: Roman

Who are you and what is your role at Testomato?

I’m Roman, and I’m a Senior Developer working at Testomato. Mainly, my job is to handle the PHP side of the application (back-end).

What is the best part of your job?

The best part of my work is using recent technologies to create something beautiful and new.

What’s been your proudest moment working on this project?

The first time we got positive feedback on Testomato’s functionality from users was probably my proudest moment. But, there was another really great behind-the-scenes thing that happened about six months ago. The skeleton for Testomato was used as the base for another project. Since then, of course, there’s been a lot changes – they’ve got a whole new version – but some of my code is still there.

How did you get into web development?

I started seriously coding in high school. Making web pages for myself became one of my favorite things to do – and then, I got my first job. It was working for a guy in the city of Opava, who later went on to work for Microsoft. As a kid in high school, it was a dream job. Great pay and a lot of fun. It was definitely not your average badly-paid summer job.

What is your least favorite error?

I don’t really have one. The way I see it, there will always be some errors when you test code. At Testomato, our job is to find errors and fix them. They’re my bread and butter.

However, the worst thing that has ever happened to me as a developer was when an SSD drive I had crashed, leaving only 8MB of 120 gigs of data! Luckily, I had everything backed up on GIT. It took me a whole day to set everything back up. And then…3 weeks later – the same thing happened! That time I was prepared: I had a backup and reinstallation only took me 30 mins. Sometimes, technology has a way of eating up your time (and not in a good way!) – so it’s best to always be prepared.

My least favorite error in real-life, though, is getting a scratch on my car!

What is the hardest part of developing an application?

The beginning is always the hardest part of developing an application. For me, it was pretty difficult with Testomato because we needed to create something completely new. I didn’t want to start with the same architecture we already had for a previous project, so I had to develop something more flexible and smaller.

Tell us one geeky fact about yourself.

I have backup for everything that I’ve ever done, including the first program I made in grammar school. It was a small games launcher application.

You can tweet or follow Roman @OzzyCzech and be sure to check out his blog.