You will grow as a professional as fast as you take care of your spaceship

After four years of my degree in Computer Science, a university internship, a training bootcamp and a long confinement due to COVID-19, I found my workplace.

At the beginning, when you arrive in a new place, the fear of failure is present. You have to be honest about the knowledge you have and listen to those who have been working for a long time in this area in order to quickly learn.

The first day of a new job is a bit like the first day of class. Many emotions and concerns are presented in the mind: curiosity, anxiety, interest, hope, nervousness and even fear. Fortunately, I found a company that worried that these concerns turned into opportunities from the first moment.

We started with some onboarding days with some talks from the mentors about their experience, culture, values, methodologies and different ways of working in each team within an international company like Creditas.

The first impression I got from hearing about the values of Creditas was that all sounded too nice to be true. But, as the days go by and you get to know the people of each team, you realize that they are one of the main pillars to enhance daily development, which is the most appropriate way to get the best results, and thus be able to obtain the maximum performance of each crew member.

Personally, I would highlight three key points throughout my onboarding. Trust, ownership and the importance of feedback from the first moment you enter in the company, regardless of your rank. The team is composed by people who add value to the company and who help each other to achieve the common objectives.

A good way to enhance these three points in a developer is to do pair-programming sessions to perform daily tasks within each team, in order to generate higher quality code and continually learn from your colleagues.

Once the onboarding was finished, I was lucky enough to be part of a new team in the company, where I can learn all the processes and phases to build a new Creditas @work iniciative.

The beginning was a bit hard, a new team, new crew members, people changing from one team to other team, holidays of part of the team and, a great challenge ahead.

We started with discovery sessions together with the product team to define how to develop the idea that the business team had for this new product.

At the same time, we had the challenge of learning how to implement native solutions, since no one in the team had the experience of developing applications for mobile devices.

Once the way to approach the solution was defined, we began to develop the application. We had many meetings with some teams from Brazil, who shared their experience and their good practices with us in order to tackle the development of the application.

Due to the functionality of the new project, a native application that would serve as a point of connection for all the products offered by the company, we found multitude dependencies throughout the project. These dependencies, together with the way to organize some processes in the team to tackle the challenge, made it difficult to reach our goal.

But like the great teams, we knew how to put all the pieces of the gear together and to detect the points that were compromising our delivery.

In addition, I would like to emphasize the importance of the retrospective sessions in order to see what we were missing and to get points for action and improvement.

Through these action points and the new way of organizing ourselves, we were able to reach a solution that would add value to the end customer.

We achieved the objective of the company, a native application that will help the user know everything that is available within the Creditas ecosystem.

The first delivery was focused on new users who accessed the application. The following deliveries were oriented to users who already had a contracted product. They could know the status of their product and the product allow him to visualize everything they had available with their payroll.

Currently, the application is in production. We are collecting all the information and feedback from the end customer in order to continue improving it.

Within the team, we have a clear objective about where we want to go and what we want to build. We want to improve all processes to achieve engineering excellence.

This involves a group effort in order to address the key points in a constructive way, without neglecting the daily tasks, and improving the overall performance.

Personally, I want to continue taking advantage of the opportunities offered by working in a company that offers you daily challenges to grow as an engineer.

For the new crew members, I would recommend to be constant, to enjoy the work, listen to the colleagues and reading as much as possible, in order to share their knowledge while they learn from colleagues with more experience.

As a conclusion, I would highlight everything I learned these last days in which I have grown as an engineer. The importance of creating clean, scalable and well-monitored code. The importance to control how our systems evolve, in order to be able to anticipate and to define possible improvements in our products and avoid the phrase that an astronaut would never want to say: “Houston we have a problem”.

Albert Pla, 2020

Interested in working with us? We’re always looking for people passionate about technology to join our crew! You can check out our openings here.