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Top comments (16)
This was kinda cheating, because I know the owner, but I got to develop the software to manage a university’s students, teachers, semester plans, grades, payments, university event calendar.
It was wild, specially because it was the first time I did web development. After two years I lead a team of 5 to do this.
Everything that came after that was boring 😂
The first job after that was make responsive views for a chat application.
Sounds fun, especially considering how awful the online apps were when I was in school. What language, etc. did you use?
I used Ruby on Rails. Became a huge fan of it 🤩
My really first project was about developing a web chat based on Skype for Business API. It successfully comunicated with the real Skype application installed on various desktops. All was done in AngularJS.
That sounds pretty cool! Was the point to "enhance" Skype with additional functionality or tailor it to a certain need or ..?
There was the need that any user that visited the web application could open a direct message session with someone on the backend. The company had a Skype for Business plan so we used that to receive all those messages.
It was a sign-in/out program for people and vehicles at a consulting firm. Later, I added onto it an expense reporting page modeled after the spreadsheet they were using. It was written on the LAMP stack back in the late 90s, early 00s.
I was actually working as IT support -- not hired as a dev. But when all the workstations were in good shape, I had a bit of free time in that job. I had taken programming classes in high school (BASIC and Pascal). And no one could locate the source code for the old VB desktop app that did the same job. So they had me rewrite it as web-based.
They not only used that software internally, but they also sold it to other companies. It might still be running somewhere. Even though I wasn't hired as a dev, this software went to production and helped manage some business activities. So I count this as my first professional dev experience.
Sadly, I've ran into this same issue a few times.. some even recently.
This is amazing. Were you the only one working on the rewrite? Did you use that experience to springboard you into other development jobs?
I was the only one working on it. I can't remember the exact timeline, but I imagine it took me a pretty long time. PHP was a recent phenomenon, so I taught it to myself as well as rudimentary HTML and CSS. I also used some very basic MySQL. I didn't even learn about indexes and foreign keys until several years later. :)
I remember the experience solidifying that I didn't want to do programming for a living. That I instead wanted to focus on sysadmin (now called Ops). But employers kept finding dev work for me to do once they caught wind. And through a previous employer, I kept picking up dev side projects for extra money. Until I eventually decided if I was going to keep doing it, I had to figure out how to make it not such a brain-frying experience. Today, 19 years later, (as part of a great team) I love it and I don't want to do anything else.
The first project that comes to mind is implementing an Apple Push Notification service through our Rails API shortly after I started as a full-stack developer. I was trying to do everything alone and just spent hours and hours and hours changing things and reading the response from the server. In the end, I had to get Redis involved. It was mostly a damn nightmare and I should have had someone around to help me through it.
Trial by fire. 😂
Would you say that it was a good learning experience though?
Sure, but I would encourage dev teams not to leave their juniors lost in the wilderness like that.
The first time I got paid to do something web-y was while I was working at this local Burger place. The managers had been doing the schedule as a somewhat formatted Excel spreadsheet they would print out and tape to the office door every week.
I got real tired of forgetting to take a picture of the schedule and being late so I decided to make the scheduling process a little more 21st Century.
To get buy in from the managers, I had to keep their workload functionally the same. What I ended up doing was translating their schedule spreadsheet into a Google Sheets spreadsheet.
Which generated a Printable Version:
And posted each week's schedule to a WordPress site so our staff (mainly me) could access the current live schedule from anywhere.
It was really cool and worked great until there was a management shake up and the new GM was like "Nah, I'm just going to write the schedule out by hand".
They went out of business shortly after.
For me, my first job as a professional was an internship at a records management consulting company (very exciting stuff). My first project was automating PowerPoint reports for the operations staff. While auditing one of their clients, they would enter a bunch of data into a SQL database for reporting. Then, they would create these presentations in PowerPoint by hand to show off their insights. I used VBA to run some queries against that SQL database and merge it into a PowerPoint template that I set up. It blew minds.
I had to implement a forget password system from scratch that sends mail to the user verifies them and changes their password. I used phpmailer for this task.
That's awesome! I remember Microsoft sponsoring a few of those types of competitions around me as well. Did you ever release the mobile app to the store?