Written by Michelle Wong - Marketing Specialist
We sat down for a chat with Ben Frengley, one of our software developers who has been with the company for three years since September 2021. This piece has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Where did your passion for tech start?
It probably started with my parents – they both did computing training for agricultural farmers and forestry. Growing up we always had a bunch of computers around. When I was a kid, I was set up playing Pokémon Blue on an emulator on Windows 95.
My earliest memory of programming is my dad teaching my sister and me to write Blackjack in Visual Basic for Applications and Excel. I was maybe ten or so.
What attracted you to work at Comet?
The actual interview process was fun. During my interview with Mason, our CTO, we spent 90 minutes talking about writing compilers and emulators. We had an immediate rapport. I could see the clear passion Mason has for technology and programming. I really enjoyed our conversation and could tell Comet would be a good place to work.
How would you describe the team culture?
Comet is a very people-first company and very human. It's a workplace where it's more about the people than the product. The team members at Comet are clearly interested in and passionate about technology.
The team culture is very collaborative, in terms of how we approach problem solving and goal setting, we work together on addressing how to achieve things and everyone, at every level, can get involved.
Everyone’s contributions and ideas are welcome, from team leads to junior developers. You feel like you can immediately get involved in the discussions, which I think can be intimidating in other workplaces.
What does your day-to-day look like?
I work on a lot of different things at once. I’m often the person who looks into obscure software bugs customers encounter. I also enjoy proactively combing through the code to identify issues and fixing them up. So it's pretty varied each day.
You were a mentor to Jackson, one of the junior developers. What did you enjoy about being a mentor?
It was very rewarding because when Jackson came in, he was at the beginning of his career. He was still finishing his university degree while he was started working here in the junior developer / support role, so he was quite fresh.
It really gave me an opportunity to help shape someone's thinking about software and development and how to approach problem solving. Everybody at Comet is incredibly lovely, so he was just very fun to teach as well.
Being a mentor taught me a lot about communication and understanding how other people approach problems because people think in very different ways. It’s beneficial to see how the other person approaches things.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a developer?
Always ask questions and ask why. My number one tip for working out what’s going wrong is to read the error messages – read the thing that tells you what’s going wrong. It sounds obvious, but it's a real skill that takes practice.
You learn when something goes wrong you have to learn how to connect the dots and oftentimes there are very obvious hints on where to look, you just have to pay attention and learn to filter out what's relevant and how it relates to the internal state of your program when it went wrong.
Thoroughly reading your error messages and your stack traces and all of the information that you get given when something goes wrong is the first thing that you should do. It's easy to fall into the trap of jumping straight back into your code to find the why without first understanding the what and where.
What keeps you passionate and moving forward in the field?
I like problem solving – it is very logical but also creative. I really enjoy digging and understanding why something is the way it is and I think that's why I end up on a lot of bug investigations.
There's a lot of satisfaction in learning how something works and then putting all the little pieces together to figure out why it's not working exactly how it should. I think that's just a fascination from my entire life that applies extremely easily to software development.
What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of work?
I like rock climbing, bouldering, hiking, reading, and playing games. I got a 3D printer recently, which is fun. I also like growing lots of plants; I have chilli plants and a collection of maybe 30 succulents and some orchids.
We know everyone at Comet loves food. Do you have any favorite recipes?
I've always been into baking. My mother loves cooking, that's where I get that from. When I was a kid we would always have fresh bread out of the bread maker. Then I got a bread maker for my 21st birthday and I still make bread.
These are some cookie recipes that I’ve been using recently: The Ideal Chocolate Chip Cookie video from YouTube and this Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.
