The developer years - Part 1
The first job was back in 2009 in my hometown: La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sort of halfway in my Computer Science career, I got connected to a professor from the university that was looking for developers to work in a small consultancy. It was three founders, and two developers (a friend of mine and me).
We had to wear all the hats, designer, system operations, developer, project manager, customer support and sometimes sales. It was exciting, finally starting to see how theory meets practices. Also quickly figuring out that building software is a lot more than just writing it.
The following two and a half years were full of learning, understanding how to deal with all sorts of different people wanting and needing different things, and how software was the meeting point to all this equation.
Tools of the trade: MySQL, Linux, Apache Servers, PHP, Symfony framework, SVN and vim.
The next step was working within a slightly larger (10-15 people) team as part of a laboratory from university, building software for different Faculties and associated organizations. This meant more structure than previously, more people to collaborate and a different set of constraints to work with.
One of the main learning of this stage was around organizing work in teams and incorporating a new set of tools: Ruby, Rails, TDD and git.
Nowadays, these tools come as no surprise to anyone but back then they introduce me to a new workflow. Ruby presented me to the idea of testing and TDD. Git was a different way to versioning software, the concept of feature, release and master branches tied neatly with testing, increasing the confidence of incrementally building working software.
These few years were marked by widening skills, learning how to collaborate and piece things together. Concepts like DRY, SOLID, Continuous Integration and Agile Software Development methodologies started to resonate in my brain.
The years between 2012 and 2013 were a combination of stable work within the university, finishing up with my degree and also long-term gigs as a contractor working for different government organizations.
It was very intense, I got deeper in my project management skills, as well as my technical ones. Work on projects involving both web and mobile development which was new to me, looking at tools like PhoneGap and native Java-based mobile SDKs.
It was at this point where I had a few major life-changing events: I got married, finished university and at the same time decided to move permanently to the UK. This was in order to complete a plan that had started 18 years back.
Ahead was a new country, a new way of working, new challenges and understanding a different market to the one I was exposed to. It was in this new and exciting face I got my first opportunity to what today is my focus: building a team and leading delivery of software.
Thanks for reading, I will be making by-weekly updates as I move closer to current times. Writing about my experiences and challenges, hopefully, can be useful to others going through the same.