Fellowship of the front-ends
Over my career, one of the things I've missed the most was working with other front-end developers. Of course, I was not the only one at the companies I've been through, but they had few developers, and everyone was super busy taking care of more than one team or project at the same time. Not working with other developers was hard for me while I was growing as a professional because I was unsure if what I was doing or learning was right.
When I got into Viva Real, things were a lot different, and we had two or three front-end developers per project. And having more developers was a massive change for me. For the first time I had people reviewing my code, pair programming became a daily thing, and then finally, I was able to see where I should improve or not. We also had a front-end meeting that used to happen whenever necessary to share what we were doing or whatever happened that was worth sharing.
But then Viva Real and ZAP merged into Grupo ZAP, and everything got messy since all the things that I was used to, all the processes, daily pairing, and meetings, have changed. In one week, we were in tune, and the next one, we had twice the number of employees and projects. It was hard. This subject by itself could be a trilogy of blog posts. Maybe I'll do it later.
The front-end team remade many projects from scratch. Suddenly, I was in the same situation I've described at the beginning of this post. Everyone was super busy, which was understandable since we needed efficiency and quick deliveries.
One day we've decided to bring that dead front-end meeting back to life. All front-end developers from the company got together to share what they were doing. The main goal was to know which projects existed and what tools everyone was using. It was a surprise to everyone to see that even working separately, we've chosen the same framework for new projects: Vue.js.
With this, things started to change.
That discovery was nice because now we had so much to share about doing things. Using Vue was something new to everyone. We were all learning, and each project had some particularity to deal with it.
That partnership I used to have with my squad reached all front-end developers. So we've started to work as a guild, which was fantastic, and with time the developers brought new topics to discuss:
- Sharing our study methods was one of the first things we've done. It was nice to see different approaches and raise the possibility of studying together.
- We've updated our engineering ladder, adding new and better examples for our front-end profile. This improvement was essential because now everyone would do a fair performance cycle and also helped us do better interviews, knowing what to expect from a candidate.
- Not everyone knew what paid tools we had, so we analyzed them in one of our meetings to see which was helpful or unnecessary to save some money.
And after all these meetings, we realized we could do even more.
Another accomplishment of our guild was taking a whole day to share components between our applications. We called it "Front day." And that was the beginning of our design system, Lina.
To give an idea of how awesome this project is: while the guild was thinking about how nice it would be to share our components, the design team was already in the process of making it possible. The project is still going, and both teams are working together. Lina is a project I'm proud of.
Additionally, once a month, we get together to our "Coffee with front-ends" (where "Coffee" actually means "Beer" haha) to chat about life, the universe, and everything.
Guild front-end is how people can find us on Slack or Github and ask for help, share solutions, or chat. It's not a closed group, and anyone can join us, even managers! hahaha
Nothing that I have written here is final. On the contrary, our processes constantly change, either for improvements or adaptations. But the primary purpose of our guild is to give a place for anyone to share their thoughts.
I hope that everyone in the guild feels safe to share anything as I do. ❤️
Have you ever thought about working in such a lovely place? We're hiring! :)
