My First Month as an Engineer at Unibuddy

Wednesday of last week marks one month since I began my journey as a Support Software Engineer with Unibuddy. What a ride it has been.

I’ve been welcomed with nothing less than support, encouragement, and a willingness to help me grow.

My role is fully remote with the majority of the company working on the other side of the world, and my manager has been committed to making at-home on-boarding as seamless as possible. This has involved staying in constant communication for the overlap of our working days, putting systems in place to report the ongoing status of work, and countless pair-programming sessions.

A few of the things I’ve worked on:

• Support Ticket Troubleshooting — this is at the beginning of our bug pipeline where our Customer Success Team reaches out to Support to troubleshoot a quirk our partners may be experiencing in one of our products.
• Build Features for Internal Tools — our Support Team holds technical ownership of our internal dashboard, so I’ve had the pleasure of getting to spend time crafting the tools that members of our company use every day.
• Professional Bug Squishing — I’d like to think that this is the bread and butter of our Support Team. What this looks like is working through Jira tickets created from the front end of our bug pipeline to fix breaking code and deploy our solutions.
• Build Features for Products — a perk of working for a high-growth startup is that you get to wear many hats and work across teams. I’ve had the opportunity to add new features to some of our products.

Of course, facing the challenges of transitioning into a new role can be uncomfortable, and it will feel like I am ineffective at times. However, I recognize these feelings as a sign of personal growth, and in hindsight, I’ve learned more than I could have imagined I would have over this past month.

Key-learnings so far:

• Company Culture — a huge part of working for Unibuddy is lifting our company’s values and embracing the success of our peers. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know my co-workers at the various virtual hangouts we have throughout the week.
• Tech stack — we use a modern stack consisting of MongoDB, React, Python, and GraphQL. I’ve had previous experience with some of these technologies, but not all. There is an endless amount to learn here, and I feel that over the past month, having the opportunity to dive headfirst into our codebase has enabled a ton of learning opportunities.
• Codebase — one of the more difficult parts of coming into a new company is learning the way around the codebase. I’m still learning, of course, but I am beginning to feel comfortable with parts of it. Various senior engineers have been there to walk me through different nooks and crannies, and I find myself learning a lot about our code structure from fixing bugs as they come up.
• Products — in my first week, my supervisor took me through a pretty detailed walk-through of each of our products. This was followed up by an event we call “Onboarding Academy” where I got to meet with various members of the organization that walked me through each of our products a second time. These introductions taught me a lot, and gaining hands-on experience troubleshooting Support issues has taught me so much about all of our offerings and their functionality.

Overall, I am enjoying my time at Unibuddy tremendously. I am grateful to have such awesome co-workers, such great leadership, and such an opportunity to take ownership and grow. I can’t wait for what’s to come.