DEV Community

Kiddy The Kid
Kiddy The Kid

Posted on

My first job as a junior programmer

*** Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker *** (I know, this card is played a lot of times)

It was July 17th 2017, and I got my first job that was focused on my career. When I first got into the job I was lost and lacked a lot of information about the technologies they were using, like postgresql database and Java. I knew almost nothing about that and what I knew about programming was just a little bit of c#.

I accepted the job, and after waiting a few days, I was in front of my computer with my new coworkers. I was scared, I just opened the first file of the project with some instructions in there that detailed every location of the platforms they were managing. I just started reading the code without even knowing how to correctly use an IDE. A month passed and I was afraid I couldn't do anything, felt like a lost all chances... I tried asking some friends, and there I was guided on how to use some tools inside netbeans, that would help navigate through the code.

My boss called and told me if I was not prepared for the job, I told him I wasn't as he would want me to be. After a short silence he told me he could get the programmer that was before me, to help me by teaching me on how to read the code BUT I gotta be careful because after that there would be no excuse I could use to expand the time I was given to finish the project. At the end, my boss didn't call him and I had to figure out on how to read and manipulate the code carefully.

I finished it... I finished that project but I knew it had a lot of bad practices implemented there that I was afraid to look back but I wasn't stopping there, I began to read documentation about Java 7 and read a lot of the code and how it was used. I began to work on features and fixes that the platform needed like changing the download method from direct reference to the file to using indexed Db, just because it was needed to know exactly when the download finished and so on... Files saved inside the database as byte array, now stored inside a folder with a reference to it inside the database... Implementation of methods to ease the development of new features, a file that hold all constants used by the software itself that was unreadable if you are new to the code they used, I'm now in calm because I know I could do the job, I know I still have too much to learn but if you love what you are doing, you might end up doing the same, maybe in a better way and without loosing so much time, but you will do it.

I love programming, it gives headaches sometimes, like anything would do, but it's part of the path you must follow to become the best.

I hope you enjoyed what I wrote
Have a nice coding experience and never give up, you will end up finishing what you wanted to and you will feel proud of yourself.

Top comments (0)