Ben Daly

What's your job about?

I was hired into the innovation lab of Theta – essentially a team to investigate new and exciting technologies and build ideas into proofs-of-concept with them

My role consisted of working on a proof-of-concept café ordering bot – codename Hungry Bot – with which we worked alongside a local café to build both an orders and menu management interface and a chatbot to make orders from

I also worked alongside a colleague to build a web scraper – although the details are confidential, the basic premise was to be able to log in, crack a captcha, harvest information from a website and store it for analytical use

My current day to day is working on our suite of SaaS (Software as a Service) products, building features and supporting our customers

What's your background?

I was born in the United Kingdom and moved to New Zealand when I was 5, so most of my growing up was done here in NZ

I have always been interested in computers/software from a young age but didn’t think of creating a career out of it initially

Two main tipping points for me choosing my career were

1. Not enjoying my initial major at university (Mathematics and Chemistry) and pivoting to Computer Science
2. Post degree unpaid internship for Hansen Technologies – built a data visualisation from scratch within an existing utilities management product – gave me a huge confidence boost when thinking about my career from that point

I have been in my current position of Consultant in the Product Group at Theta for around 3 years – we work on SaaS (Software as a Service) products that are currently or soon to be in a market like EVA Check-in (https://evacheckin.com) or FAQ Bot (https://faqbot.ai)

Could someone with a different background do your job?

Not a doubt in my mind that someone currently doing something different could get into this industry and do the same job as me – Learning resources and courses are aplenty and the industry is still booming

What's the coolest thing about your job?

Working on products that make an impact in people’s lives however small it may be. The most enjoyable part of the job is the problem solving – always keeping your mind active and thinking about the problem and potential solutions

What are the limitations of your job?

Working with people across the country – can sometimes be a hindrance

Small team – although we get a tonne of great work done, sometimes things that we would like to have in our products get pushed back due to resource constraint

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...

1. Try harder – tended to take things pretty lax at high school and university
2. Be more confident in my ability
3. Take any internship/learning opportunity you can – very valuable experience