Smart Pension work experience
Occasionally we have someone spend a week’s work experience with the Smart Pension Engineering teams, as part of our wonderful goal of encouraging people to try something new, change careers, or learn more about how an Engineering team delivers amazing software.
Recently, Danielle Inkster, spent a week with one of our Engineering teams, called “Spider Pigs” — our teams get to name themselves. The following is the article that she wrote, this being her first time in an office after having changed careers from working in social service and teaching.
Having recently completed a course in software development at Maker’s Academy, I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to take part in a week’s work experience at Smart Pension. During my time there, I was able to shadow one of their development teams, the Spider Pigs, whose members included a Tech Lead, Engineers, a Product Owner, a Quality Assurance Engineer and an Agile Coach.
Very quickly, I found myself doing “whatever a Spider Pig does,” which, in this case, meant getting to work. Each day started with a quick stand-up with the team, where members discussed what they’d been working on, where they’d made progress and where they were blocked and what they planned to accomplish for the day. Following that, I partnered with different members of the team, each of whom patiently explained to me what they were working on, how their code would work within the product as a whole or how it would resolve bugs. Though some tasks initially seemed overwhelming to someone just starting out in this field, with their help I was able to orient myself pretty quickly to what was meant to be done.
I was pleased to find there were a lot of areas of overlap between what I’d learned in my program and how developers were working at Smart Pension. Obviously, the languages, libraries and frameworks I’d studied (Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/React.js) were being used — I understood most of Smart Pension’s code and, fairly quickly, how some of the different models worked together to help create a cohesive product.
While I pride myself on writing clean, well-crafted code, I confess that debugging is a passion of mine. I was grateful that the program I attended put so much focus on learning the principles of test-driven development (TDD) as well as strong debugging skills. I had the chance to go through some of Smart Pension’s RSpec tests and see how testing, as well as things like mocking and stubbing, can be used in real-world development.
This was also a great opportunity to see how Agile practices are applied in the workplace within cross-functional teams. Maker’s curriculum is built on a foundation in Agile development. In addition to TDD, we also learned pair-programming, to use stand-ups and retrospectives and work in sprints. I was lucky enough to see it put into action shadowing the team at Smart Pension, as well as getting to learn more about its application and benefits from the team’s Agile coach.
That’s not to say there weren’t gaps in my knowledge however; it would have been more than presumptuous for me to assume that I would come in knowing everything. Every night, I ended up taking home lists of terms, methods and unfamiliar tech that I’d heard about or seen used during the day, and would then spend my evenings researching them. I spent hours reading up about the AWS cloud platform and how their services for databases and storage work. I went down many a rabbit hole about Ruby fibers and threads and I’m beginning to understand how concurrency can be used to improve performance and reduce lag. In many ways I finished my week with more questions than answers, which has given my learning and projects more direction for the future.
While I learned a lot during my work experience with Smart Pension, the most valuable part of the experience was learning the importance of developing ‘T-shaped knowledge,’ that is, having a depth of knowledge on a few things and a breadth of knowledge on many things. I think a lot of recent graduates, like myself, feel compelled to try to learn everything about every language and framework in order to appear more valuable to a potential employer. Unfortunately, this more often than not results in not knowing enough about anything. This experience has shown me that I would be best served by developing a deeper understanding of the languages and frameworks I’ve already begun, rather than dabbling around.
Overall, this was an invaluable experience in my journey to becoming a full-fledged developer. I’m grateful to all the people at Smart Pension who made this experience possible, particularly to the “Spider Pigs” team for all their patience, kindness and support. I look forward to applying what I’ve learned through this experience to my next job, wherever it may be!
