Editorial Articles

Digital recruitment consultancy Become helped Sunil Parekh find his role as Developer at online retailer ASOS. He gives Figaro a guided tour of his world

What will your role involve at ASOS, and what do you hope to achieve?

It's mostly front-end web development and email marketing. There’s a high through-put of content and features so the creative juices here are flowing thick and fast. There’s a lot of exposure to the bleeding edge of digital design.

It’s a challenge because of the pace of technological change and the speed at which the fashion industry moves. Although the products at the end of the line are clothes, footwear, etc, the customer conversation is about style and culture. In a purely online business, the industry model looks a bit more like media or even entertainment. This in turn throws up some interesting challenges in a company that is growing as fast as it is.

What is your main responsibility at ASOS?

Primarily I’m delivering site content projects for the UK and international sites, so I’ll be working on most parts of the site excluding the shop and transactional areas.

From your experience at ASOS so far, how much would you say current digital trends have changed their offering and the way in which they work?

I think the story here is very similar to what’s happening everywhere else: reliance on Flash is dropping; js is a core component; social media is being integrated where it makes sense to do so.

When it comes to the new HTML standard the department is moving ahead with caution, as the site has to work well for a wide range of visitors. If the customer can’t see the content because they’re using an out of date browser, for whatever reason, they won’t be spending their money on the site. Mobile, however is rushing forward, the new iPad and iPhone apps have just been released and most of the site including the shop works consistently well across the majority of smartphone handsets.

There are also successful integrations with social media services which enhances the ASOS experience. Facebook and Twitter play a big part but other services like Instagram are creeping in. The average customer is in their early twenties – that's people who were born in the 1990s - they’re as old as the internet itself, digital natives whose conversation is predominantly online and dominated by internet culture.

What qualities make for a successful Developer?

Thick skin, pigheadedness, irreverence… I’m only half joking. The nature of web development as a skill is unlike most other skills-based professions. The way you work and the tools with which you do your work are continuously evolving at a constantly accelerating speed. There are also many people involved in decisions up the chain which impact your work, so a resilient attitude is necessary. It's quite possible to achieve anything on the web as long as there is an infinite amount of resources and creative talent available on tap. There are very few organisations - if any at all - that can afford to operate in that manner, so if you want to get home in time for tea, you have to tell it like it is.

What do you think is the most significant issue currently facing Developers?

For those of us working on front-end dev the story hasn’t really changed - standards within browsers is key. On the horizon we know that delivering rich media is vital to staying relevant, so being able to rely on the government to deploy a fat, reliable national network and ISPs to roll that out competitively to the public so we can build great stuff that doesn’t take ages to load.
Questions that developers, or digital professionals - or come to that any skills-based workers - may have are being resolved at fantastic speed and are increasingly accurate because of social filtering methods thanks to information resources such as Delicious, StackOverflow, Quora, Aardvark, etc. It's often more taxing to decide what to have for lunch then to work out how to make the pixels do that whizzy thing (not my words, that was the designer of course).

What’s your current (or favourite) Facebook status?

I posted the trailer to the ASOS Urban Tour feature. Tbh I’m over Facebook. Unsocial networks and hyper-local networks are where it's at. For example anyone in Hackney check out yeahhackney.com - quality info right there.

What site or app could you not live without?

Mark Bittman the American food writer has a great cookbook app on the iPhone which I use a lot, it's called 'How to cook everything Vegetarian'. Its revolutionised mealtimes at Casa Parekh.

What’s the most listened to track on your iPod?

I don’t really listen to single tracks, I’ve got auto-populating smart playlists which stack up tracks and podcasts. My go-to albums whilst I’m deep in code are usually something from Amon Tobin. Recently a friend introduced me to Oh No’s album called 'Dr. No’s Ethiopium'. My most listened track is the intro on that album called 'Pardon Me'.

Who’s your favourite fictional character?

Can I have two? The Count of Monte Cristo and Superman.

And who do you admire most in the real world?

Almost de facto for me because of where I’m from (I don’t mean Birmingham) and because I know his story so well is Mahatma Gandhi. For someone alive today I’d say Joe Rogan [US comic] is a pretty cool guy, I’m getting to know a lot about him through his podcasts.

What do you think will be the most important new technology in the next 24 months?

There’s a sea-change coming for telecoms, even compared to what's happened in the last decade. Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are in very dominant positions to completely change the way this industry operates. Amazon are already ahead of the curve with global 3G access to the net on the Kindle but it's like, nobody is aware how incredible that is. They’ve cut out the carrier. As soon as the other three embed sims in their devices we’ll have a Google voice contract with Google or iPhone contract with Apple and probably something messy with Windows Phone that Microsoft will bodge together. These companies are already some of the biggest on the planet. Their dominance in telecoms spells good things for the two thirds of the world's seven billion people who aren’t yet online.

Finally, what do you see as the future of the digital industry?

Diversification, skills will spread out further and become more refined. Basic skills will become more widespread, I can imagine HTML might even be part of the computer science curriculum and be taught at GCSE level. I think it looks good.