Cross Platform, Digital, GIality, Staff, Team Spotlight, UrbanPlanAR, VentusAR, Xamarin

Staff Spotlight – George Banfill


Our latest team spotlight is our Technical Director George Banfill.

GB

Who are you and what is your role at Linknode?
I’m George Banfill – husband, father, sailor, cyclist, geek and tired. (Comes of having a 3 year old and a 4 month old at home).

 What is your role at Linknode?
I oversee all the product software development and software releases we do as a company.  I was employee number two back in August 2011 and have been working on building cross platform mobile apps and supporting systems ever since. I’ve been involved in building and overseeing Windows phone, Windows 8, Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS development as well as creating asp.net web sites to support them.

 What is on your wish list for the next 10 years at Linknode?
I want Linknode to be an enabling technology company. I want to be at the forefront of technology development. We’re just riding the wave of Virtual Reality apps and services at the moment. However I think Augmented Reality’s peak is yet to come – let’s see how Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and the like do this year and then we can play with HoloLens and the next version of Google Glass in the future.

What technologies, processes, and techniques do you get to use?
I’m always on the look out for new tools and technologies that will help improve our software development process. We got into Xamarin early on (2012?) and felt the pain of an early product – it’s much better now. More recently I have been looking at Dev-ops and continuous deployment tools, so I’ve added fastlane tools to our nightly builds to help us deliver updates to our apps to our apps more efficiently. (Once I have done an internal technical session on this, I will write a blog post about it). The next thing that I want to look at is using Xamarin test cloud to add some automated testing on devices to our continuous / nightly builds.

What is your proudest moment at Linknode?
Becoming a film star for the day in some of our videos or being interviewed on the Xamarin blog.

What books are at your bedside?
There’s a bit of a random collection from a pile of old SingleTrack and Royal Yatching Association magazines, a collection of fiction books to and things my sons insist I read to them at every opportunity. I’ve a collection of tech books I dip in and out of: Dreaming in Code to Don’t Make me Think and I’ve started reading a lot on Medium recently.

What is the last joke you recall?

What’s the difference between roast chicken and pea soup?
Anyone can roast a chicken, but no one can pea soup.

What is your hidden talent?
After University I worked as a Sailing instructor in Greece for a summer. It was 2004 and there were not very many jobs in tech – it was the crash after the dot com boom, so I worked on a beach in the sunshine everyday for a summer. I just remember it when looking out over another Glasgow rainy day.

GB_Sailing