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Can you share an experience where you stepped out of your comfort zone in coding, and looking back, you're glad you did?
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Top comments (5)
Single Sign-On. It's a common feature in B2B SaaS products and fairly important to maintain as a broken feature or misconfigured customer integration has a devastating impact on usability and reputation.
I wasn't involved with implementing the feature on the product originally, as the Mobile Architect I owned the mobile experience. One day we had a mobile-specific SSO issue arise with a high-ARR customer, and I had to go from zero to hero in a week to resolve the issue.
That first support request was painful, I complained a lot, but most importantly - I solved the problem on my own in a reasonable amount of time, and I learned A LOT. This experience for better or worse, positioned me as the SSO guru as I now understood the mechanics of the protocol and the nature of the integration that both sides configured. I developed an expertise across different SSO vendors and developed a series of guides for other engineers to perform SSO related tasks - like troubleshooting or spinning up developer resources (SSO instances) for testing.
The benefit of being uncomfortable?
That's sometimes the first clue you are experiencing an opportunity for growth.
Having to work in a code base full of legacy code that was written in an unsupported language was probably far out of my comfort zone for a while. Dealing with it really made me better at a series of languages though that are still used today and I'm able to perform better at my new position because of it!
Change and migrate the codebase from Jupyter Notebook cells into Python scripts for a $30 freelance work. During that time, I knew for sure Jupyter Notebook was a first mistake I made when I knew the deployment will be easier in script. I used to code and explored in Jupyter Notebook, and I was never prepared for the deployment part. I need ChatGPT to guide me on how to deploy it even though I've already coded my solution in a modular function in Jupyter Notebook, but it needed to be in a modular class to actually worked. Software development is my weakness point. That's why I always wandering and exploring thing rather than building thing. And this comes from a Bachelor of Computer Science like me. Yes, people like me exists. Now, I will keep moving forward building things a little bit better, one step at the time, and just like Adele say passionately:
Almost every project I worked with had a different technologies and aspects of software development in the beginning of my software professional journey (this was in early 1990s until early 2000s). Though I entered each project with little knowledge and/or experience, I dived into them with interest and finally came with experience and knowledge which is invaluable. Also to note, in those times there was no internet and digital media - I had to solely depend upon books, manuals, training and of course folks I had worked with. And the hard work. I always purchased books related to the work and spent my own time learning as I worked.
If I had thought about only work related to my training, specific technologies or line of work in software field, I would not have had the experience.