Reflection Eternal…One Year As A Professional Web Developer
Last year I wrote my first Medium article about the journey of making a career change from high school science teacher to full stack web developer. I received a lot of positive feedback from it and was happy knowing it provided inspiration and motivation for others seeking to follow a similar path.
For this article I wanted to reflect on my first full year as a professional web developer and provide a little insight on what kind of challenges may lay before you after landing your first job.
It’s always good to look back as a way to gauge growth. Sometimes when you are in the thick of things, it may not be evident how much you are learning until you take that time to pause and reflect.
“If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going.” — Maya Angelou
However, before we go any further I must provide you with the most important pieces of advice taken from one of my favourite books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy:
1. Don’t Panic
2. Always carry a t̶o̶w̶e̶l̶ notebook.
The first rule is pretty self-explanatory. Keeping calm in the face of a challenge will always benefit in your favour. But why the notebook? Well, it’s pretty much like keeping a journal. It helps you keep track of daily tasks, questions you may have or things you may have learned. Use it from the start and it will allow you to look back a year from now and say “Damn, did I really do all this?!” (It may also come in handy when the time comes to renegotiate your salary 😉)
On-boarding: First Day, Week, Month — Sept 2019
The first day starting a new job at the beginning of a new career is super exciting. It’s like a child starting school for the first time. There is so much to learn and discover. The company and team I joined were very welcoming and supportive. The day was spent meeting team members and pretty much setting up my work environment, both physical desk space and digital workspace. A nice perk was being handed a brand new MacBook Pro to work on!
One good question to ask during interviews is what the on-boarding process is like for new employees. For someone starting out at a new company there is a lot to learn, but if the company provides details about how to get set up, it can make the initial transition very smooth. Our team had a rotation checklist set up and I got to discuss with other team members some of the important items to familiarize myself with including: Coding best practices, GIT flow, codebase folder structure, DevOps structure, definition of done, definition of ready, Kanban process, and the overall department structure of the company.
For a junior dev coming in, one thing was abundantly clear: the learning curve is very steep. It’s important to ask lots of questions and it’s ok to not understand everything fully right away. You will need practice and you will make mistakes. (Don’t panic!)
To be honest, I didn’t do any actual coding for at least a week. My first week was spent reading documentation, attending meetings, asking questions, reading code and trying my best to get a bird’s eye view of how the codebase is set up. At this point I had worked on small projects in order to build a portfolio, but nothing on the scale of an international eCommerce company so not a lot made sense. I was re-assured by my managers that this is ok and in time I will be more comfortable.
Eventually I started getting assigned tickets relating to small UI changes. Quick CSS fixes to get my feet wet and used to the process of opening pull requests (PRs), getting PRs approved, deploying the changes to the Quality Assurance team (QA) and debugging if those changes failed QA.
Daily stand-up meetings with fellow colleagues also allowed me to get an idea of what everyone else is working on. They are effective in helping you stay accountable as you are telling the team what you worked on the day before and what you plan to work on for the current day.
Within a month’s time I began to take on tickets with more complexity. This was exciting because I was finally able to work more with JavaScript, React, Redux and some of the other technologies I initially learned to work with. There were snags along the way, such as different libraries/concepts that I was not used to and I tended to get stuck pretty quickly. Thankfully everyone on the team was patient with me and took the time to help when I asked, and I asked a lot!
Gearing Up For Holiday Season: Oct — Dec 2019
Working on an eCommerce platform means that Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which is the Friday and Monday after American Thanksgiving, are the busiest shopping days of the year. Although developers don’t have to worry about getting trampled by stampedes in stores over giant LCD TV screens, there is a lot of pressure to make sure that the company website won’t buckle under the stress caused from higher web traffic.
During this time devs were given shifts to monitor the site and note any issues that may occur. Because I was more junior that responsibility did not fall too heavily on me, but I did my part to help with coverage and it was a great opportunity to see the team/office dynamics and just get a better understanding of how a company operates during this higher pressure time.
Most of Oct-Nov was spent working on incoming bug fixes as well as the website’s accessibility features. Making a webpage more accessible via screen readers, voiceovers, visual tab focusing and tooltips are invaluable for users with disabilities, something a developer should always keep in mind. There are actually some very interesting text-to-speech voices available for Mac users (I personally like “Bad News”!)
Overall, Black Friday and Cyber Monday were very successful and no major issues occurred. The year ended on a very positive note with an incredible company holiday party. I was beyond grateful to be part of an amazing team and looked forward to the new year. What could go wrong?
New Ground-Up Project: Jan — March 2020
Returning to work after the holidays I was told I would be part of a team that would be building a new in-house tool from scratch. Working on this project was hands-down the most important work of the year. Not only did it’s completion end up saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars but it allowed me to experience the full development process from beginning to end and gave me experience working with various technologies in the front-end and back-end and build soft skills working with other departments like business and merchandising. I gained more experience making API calls, authentication, working with servers and databases, unit testing, creating cron jobs, uploading files to FTP servers and so much more.
Participating in regular Agile ceremonies like ticket grooming, sprint retrospectives and daily stand-ups allowed me to take ownership of my work and kept all members accountable. We would consistently review code, ask questions, make suggestions and teach one another along the way. It was particularly fun when we would participate in sprint demos to the business, merchandising and other colleagues in the IT department. This was where my previous work as a high school teacher came in handy because as a teacher, presentations were part of my daily routine. Coming into the dev world self-taught there have been gaps in my knowledge. I never studied computer science and it took me longer to complete certain tasks but I never saw this as a limitation. The amount of learning on the job has certainly begun to fill those gaps. My other soft skills are what made me a valuable member of the team and this was something I was about to recognize very quickly because the whole world was about to change in a snap.
Lockdown: March — June 2020
The spread of Covid-19 turned daily life upside down. One day I was commuting to work in an office surrounded by team members and other employees, the next we were told to prepare to work from home indefinitely amid a global pandemic lockdown. Now, for someone who spent a year at home studying programming and building a portfolio in the hopes to land a job, the prospect of working remotely was a far off dream. I figured I needed the experience working at an office surrounded by brilliant coders before being able to work on my own off-site. We actually had one member on the team who was a fully remote employee so I knew it could be possible. I don’t think anyone realized how quickly the change would actually occur. However, we were very quick to adapt. Thankfully I had an office space in my home and this wonderful tool made working with multiple screens wirelessly very simple. The lockdown had a huge economic impact and my company certainly felt it. There were layoffs and pay cuts starting to happen. As a junior dev I worried that my job may be on the line too. My partner was temporarily laid off during this time so the stress/anxiety was real, especially with bills/mortgage to pay.
Now I’m very grateful that I was able to continue working. I know a lot of other people were not so lucky. There were other personal things that happened during this time but I will not get into that. I will say having work provided consistency and having something to focus on got me through a rough patch. Looking back I would also say this time was a defining moment for me because I had no choice but to level up. In the office I had plenty of other developers around that if I was stuck on something I could easily reach out to them for help. But a good developer will ask for help only after doing their own research and exhausting all available resources first. So being able to search on Google or Stack Overflow for help related to a problem was something I needed to improve upon. Also, since we were working remotely, even though team members were a quick Slack phone call away, sometimes being able to write out your question concisely was just as helpful and less disturbing for other members who had their own share of work that needed to get done.
Remote Summer: July — Aug 2020
The hard work continued all summer and working from home was actually quite enjoyable. During this time I was assigned some work on another project. This time, having the experience of joining a project mid-way, getting up to speed was quite fast. I knew how to set up my environment, was able to access all the documentation and knew how to ask clear questions to be able to handle some more challenging tickets right away. One of the highlights was being able to access nested files using recursion. My technical background as a scientist also came in very handy as I was asked to write and edit documentation for 3 app user guides. The company also made a complete overhaul of their website and a transition to Salesforce has offered a whole new opportunity to learn and grow.
Throughout the year there was a lot of learning at work but I also took time off hours to continue my education. Big shout out to Andrei Neagoie. As I explained in my first article it was his courses: The Complete Web Developer, Junior To Senior, Master The Coding Interview and Advanced JavaScript that helped me land this job in the first place. During this year I worked on a few more courses including a series on React, Python and Deno that I highly recommend. My team even asked me to give a talk on what I learned in the Deno course!
Added to this, I also took time every morning to read various articles on programming with a Medium membership. Weekly emails with article links from JavaScript Weekly and React Status are also great to keep you up to date with the latest in the world of JavaScript and React.
Some other great books I read this year and would recommend checking out include:
- Deep Work — Cal Newport
- Remote: Office Not Required — Jason Fried, David Hansson
- Front End Developer Handbook — Frontend Masters
- The Pragmatic Programmer — David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
- Functional Light JavaScript — Kyle Simpson
The learning never stops!
Conclusion: Damn, did I really do all that?!
So after one year of work the growth is certainly evident. There is still so much more to learn and do and I am more excited now than ever to continue the journey.
A big thanks to all my work colleagues, friends and family who have provided so much support and encouragement. A career change in your mid-30's is not easy but very possible. Once again, I hope this provided some insight on what a year as a junior developer may look like for anyone looking to get started in this field.
Thanks for reading! If you liked it click the “clap” button and leave a comment below. Don’t be afraid to reach out via LinkedIn if you have any questions.
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