Moving from iOS developer to backend engineer
Nearly two years ago, I left a career as an iOS developer to work as a backend software engineer at Feedzai.
My career as a mobile developer, iOS developer to be precise, started when a friend of mine invited me to join the FenixEdu team to build the university’s iOS application as a counter-part of the Android application that we had at that time. And, for the following years, I built a career in iOS by joining the Google Summer of Code programme as an iOS developer and then as a mentor for two years (I strongly recommend this programme but that’s for another post), and, later by joining a mobile consultancy company as an iOS developer.
After almost three years, I felt that If I wanted to strengthen my experience as a software engineer, I had to go beyond iOS and face new challenges. For this purpose, I decided to change my career and joined Feedzai as a backend engineer. At the time, I only knew that I would be joining the Merchants Solution team and that I would be working with Scala (for the very first time!)
This was the start of a new chapter as a software engineer.
Why Backend Engineer?
To provide some context, at a very high-level, the typical mobile architecture is built upon three layers:
- Presentation: Provides the user a User Interface (UI).
- Business: Translation of the business requirements.
- Data: Manages lower level logic such as communicating with the remote server (e.g., through a REST API), and/or managing a local database (e.g., Realm or SQLite).
Even though I enjoyed working on the Presentation Layer, I felt more connected with the last two layers: Business and Data. I was not constrained to the platform I was working with, nor did I have to manage details in the User Interface, in which the solution may make the application hard to maintain (some enjoy these challenges). It was just me, the language (Swift which is a joy to work with!) and the technology I was working with (RxSwift and Realm to name a few). These challenges were far more fulfilling to me.
Moreover, where I worked before, I was on an iOS project for one or two months before starting another project. On one hand, one will find diversity, but on the other hand, it leads to lack of quality time to develop automated tests which is something I strongly believe projects should allocate time to as it increases both quality and confidence of what you deliver to your clients.
Lastly, and most importantly, I wanted to broaden and strengthen my experience as a software engineer. For this purpose, more than understanding platforms and frameworks, I wanted to know more about software design and architecture at scale, and work with technologies such as Docker and more recently Kubernetes that are disrupting and shaping the way we build Software.
Moving to Backend Engineer
As someone with sole experience on mobile development, this was a big change for me.
When I joined Feedzai, little did I know about messaging queues, processing events at a large scale in realtime, and fighting fraud. Since I joined, I learned Scala (which I loved to work with) and Tableau, worked with RabbitMQ, and of course Java and databases such as PostgreSQL. And, more than hard-skills, I have been challenged to learn more about project management (especially mitigating risk and sustainability), about time-management (particularly prioritization), how to convey information more efficiently (see Cognitive Load 101) and, lastly, and definitely not the least: to ask why.
Today I am working with Elastic stack to design and build Feedzai Insights which is an analytics platform that help customers understand how their business and fraud teams are performing.
How would you describe yourself years from now?
The typical HR question that nobody likes to answer. However, this is the question that led me to today. I grew far more than I ever thought I would and,I would redo the same steps if I ever went back in time. I am excited for what the future holds for me.
What about you? Have you ever changed your career path?
