In September 2019, I was in the last months of my Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Campinas.
In Brazil, we make a final project that lasts for a whole semester supervised by a professor. At this time my supervisor offered me a job after getting my degree in December. She has a non-profit company that promotes robotics teaching and research, and they needed a new system to manage their organization that supports academic events.
The basic explanation is: Students subscribe to a competition, pay for their subscription, they're evaluated, earn certifications, are part of groups(to make their tasks), with mentors that must be part of schools or colleges, and there's the whole administration sector that is by far the hardest and most complex to implement.
In December when we talked more in-depth about the job, she told me that I would be the only developer, and that was my second job, the first that is not an internship(that was also in a small education tech company).
At first, it was pretty scary, because you need to know a lot to build a whole complex system from scratch, and I'm not talking about coding, that's the easiest.
I'm talking about the decision process of choosing the tech to be used, why, and if they add value to your final product. After that, you need to learn these technologies and make them all work together.
If that challenge wasn't enough we all know that just 3 months later the pandemic hit Brazil and I would never go back to the office again, fortunately, I was able to talk to the employees that use the previous system for a while and know our current robotic events and Olympics and got all the requisites.
I'm in favor to work from home, however in a situation like this the lack of communication was a serious issue, and being completely on my own made everything slower, but my growth as a professional was huge, and it still happening.
Starting my web developer career with a job like this, was the best opportunity possible, it was, and still is really hard, but showed to me that developing is MUCH more than coding. It's all about self-management, soft skills, dealing with clients, learn a lot about how each layer(front, back, design, DB, DevOps) contributes to the final result, communication, and how to learn by myself with efficiency.
I'll discuss in more detail everything involved in this job in my future posts, to make a long series of small texts. Thank you for reading!
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