Checkpoint on My Journey

Here it is, it's been two and a half years since working full time as a developer, at a local IT subcontractor company (qubiz.com)

It is a terrific journey, because I learned a lot and also accomplished many things! Just a snapshot of my current role from my last 12 months: we are upgrading an old AngularJS frontend with the latest Angular (at the moment 16.2). I had the opportunity, during the past year, to research a lot of interesting stuff, implement some proof of concept functionality, together with setup for unit testing and component architecture.

I feel that the environment is providing some great incentives to fuel my passion and perform at my best. These motivational factors are:

- great mentor who really focuses on the essentials, and without micromanaging, guides my activities

- some really hard working and smart work colleagues, who are easy to work with

- a great customer, who is willing to explain and open to communication.

My intrinsic motivators that are driving my development journey :

- curiosity, and inner drive to discover new things;

- willing to try out different approaches, risking also to fail (trial and error);

- asking questions, from colleagues and mentor, articles, Stack overflow and even Chat GPT

The process is not easy. There are lots of walls to break and hills to climb, with frustrations on the way. But, from now and then, there is a new discovered feature and issue solved. My way to conquer this summit is a step by step approach, that implied the following activities:

- researching new things and technology

- building something starting from a simple structure to a more complex solution

- improving gradually on the existing complexity, including new services, unit tests, features, and best practices

- fixing bugs on the way, and learning the lessons

- documenting everything, via a Wiki page, to record all the best practices and saving the main examples that can also be used by other developers.

- onboarding junior colleagues to start with the frontend migration, which in itself is a great lesson for me, teaches me lots of stuff about development.

A couple of years ago, I was much more attracted to the backend type of development, but it became clear that a great challenge on the frontend, could be an excellent professional target. I feel that it was worth it, even if momentarily I am not developing for the backend. I think I found a sweet-spot, by luck, by chance or by a coincidence of events. I am happy to see that I can help others and I can contribute to the growth of the project.