Starting at Vodafone Series: Martha Mandizvidza
Welcome to the last of 4 articles in our Starting at Vodafone Series, where we meet new joiners to our Digital Engineering team. In this series, we will explore what it was like to join Vodafone, what sort of work you end up doing and also some of the challenges you face. This week Martha tells us about his experience so far.
Greetings! I’m Martha Mandizvidza a Junior Frontend Engineer and member of the team that delivers a shared react component library for Vodafone.
My role at Vodafone started in October 2021. The equipment I needed for my role was already sent to me before my start date. The Vodafone onboarding team was there to help me communicate with the internal departments including my team. They also explained my job description, the background of Vodafone, and its vision. All the staff I encountered during the onboarding process were friendly and helpful.
Source Web team is a global team that supports markets across the globe as the Source Web is a product used by engineers everywhere in Vodafone. Team members ensure that all the components of the component library align with UX designs by maintaining the standards for the component library. It provides assistance for those who want to contribute to and consume the library.
As a member of the component team, my responsibility is to create components, maintain the shared component library, and support the library consumers. Sometimes, tasks can require pairing with other team members, and this gives me an opportunity to learn more about the repo, as I am able to ask questions. I thank the source web team for being supportive as they taught me how they create components and maintain the library.
During my first few months at the company, I was given various tasks, which included updating the lib-web-source Readme file, bug fixing, and writing user stories with the assistance of my manager. In addition, I had the opportunity to create the HorizontalStepper component from scratch, which gave me a better understanding of how the components of the library are created.
When I started my role, I had a few challenges to overcome, including the need to learn Figma a tool that the UX team uses to create designs and understand the codebase. My goal is to overcome these challenges by studying typescript, jest, and cypress.
Vodafone provides me with plenty of opportunities. Every week, I am given time to study and reach my goals. Specifically, I use the training resources provided by Vodafone to its employees, such as Front-end Masters and Vodafone University, an internal training hub.
There is a mentorship program at Vodafone, and I joined as a mentee. This gave me a chance to learn and share my knowledge with an experienced software engineer. It helps me revise and refine my skills. We meet every two weeks on a Tuesday and do pair programming.
Our first step was to identify exactly what I needed help with and then set goals for how he could help me achieve it. First, we worked on improving my Typescript skills, and he provided me with Javascript code that had Typescript errors. As a result of these challenges, I gained knowledge about types aliases, interfaces, functions, classes, and generics in typescript.
I joined the company during the pandemic, and I began working remotely. This was not a challenge because the source web team is well connected and if I need support, there are always team members available to help me. In our team, we do social events, and this helps us get to know one another.
My job role has given me an opportunity to improve my skills as a frontend engineer, whilst helping to build and support the vision of Vodafone.
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