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Brian Barbour
Brian Barbour

Posted on • Updated on

My First Week As A Software Developer

It's Saturday morning at the time of me writing this and I'll admit, it still feels surreal. Monday I started my job as a fullstack developer for Community Brands, working on the NimbleAMS DevOps team. It was a fantastic week and I'm enjoying the work environment.

My team is amazing. Nice seems like a paltry word to describe them. It's more than professional politeness and pleasantries. For the first time, in my entire life, I felt the sense that everyone actually was excited for me to be there. There was a earnestness about it, an authenticity that is hard to describe.

Maybe because I worked in IT support my whole career, so most people were hardened and used to turnover. To a degree, IT not an easy realm to thrive in. It takes a special kind of person to wake up and stay highly motivated to tackle issues and wrangle frustrated customers/clients. Many became jaded after years of being under those pressures. Even I had to disconnect from my tasks emotionally many times. I put on that customer service face and went into auto pilot mode most days. I would hope for some quiet time to tinker with computers, because that was the fun part.

Software development appears to have different balance. No doubt some of that same stuff is there, just in lesser doses. Just the act of dreaming up software and learning about new things gets amped up for the day. The notion that I'll be coding something that people will actually use now is crazy to me.

My entire week was dedicated to study and absorbing as much information as possible about our product and systems. Right now I'm just a human sponge. Our team builds custom software for Salesforce on their AppExchange. In fact our product NimbleAMS, is the largest app and offering on the AppExchange.

Salesforce itself is a beast of its own. I've found myself astounded the breadth and the depth of its capabilities. Even after days straight of reading and delving into the details, I've barely scratched the surface.

I think that's probably also a downside or negative so far. I can't really contribute in a meaningful way, at least not yet. I know it's my first week, but very little of the stuff I learned prior has been relevant to the way things are done with Salesforce.

I practiced mostly HTML/CSS, Javascript, React, and Node in my learning path. The Salesforce stack does have Javascript (or I probably wouldn't have this job.) Salesforce created their own entire frontend Javascript framework called Lightning Web Components that I have to delve into. Most of the back end code is in a Salesforce-unique programming language called Apex (it's based on Java.) Another big portion of stuff I'll be doing uses C#. Both of those I'm unfamiliar with.

That's three major things I have to learn and be proficient enough to be able to contribute. My team understands this and are dedicated to helping me get there. I just hope my understanding Javascript at a deep level will prove useful here. I probably just need to be patient with myself though.

Top comments (4)

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cgrossi profile image
Carmine Grossi

Thanks for sharing your experience so far! It helps someone like me who is not working as a software developer yet, gain some perspective on how things go when you actually start working.

I've been focusing on learning HTML/CSS/Javascript/Node/React as well and I'm hoping that the experience and knowledge I gain will be applicable in a future job. It sounds like you have to learn quite a bit on the job.

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bbarbour profile image
Brian Barbour

There's so many jobs using that stack. I'm sure you'll be fine. I just took a bit of a different path--mostly because of how impressed I was with this company and team during my interview process.

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bradleywilkerson profile image
Bradley Wilkerson

Congrats, Brian. I wish you much success in the future!

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Garyyyyyyy

Congrats! Put in all the hard work and effort. Definitely worth it. :)