Throughout the last 2 years I have been working in the tech industry, I have learned many things that have made me grow as a person but also as a professional.
Without a doubt, one of the experiences where I could learn more, was my first job as a developer. Where I learned many good things and others not so good that helped me to understand too important things.
Not everything is code. In a company there are more things to pay attention. And if it's small, sometimes is good we realize it to avoid future disasters of all kinds, setbacks, and so on.
Always consider alternatives
My ex boss was a designer, a good designer. He was always providing the best user experience to anyone who was going to use his UI's. I always liked his way of thinking. His designer mindset was moved to his way of dealing with clients and the way to face clients requirements.
When clients requirements were too demanding for us he used to try to understand the main problem, the clients necessities and what we really had to solve. This was the way we found solutions that didn't fully meet clients requirements but were able to solve the problem.
Sometimes we get used to specifics solutions and we end up limiting ourselves unnecessarily while what really matters is to solve a problem.
No matters how you do it, as long as that doesn't add extra work for us in the future, the only thing you really need to focus on is to get rid of it as easy and efficient as possible. And if you can do it in the most comfortable way for your team, much better.
Always prioritize your comfort
In this company we had to use Shopify to maintain many online stores which is pretty good since it's a useful CMS for this kind of projects.
The problem was that one of our clients was a big company and they used to demand very specific features that were a headache for us because using Shopify for it was very uncomfortable.
As a Junior dev with no experience taking important decisions I used to do what they told me to do. Working with Shopify code editor using Vanilla JS, HTML/CSS and Liquid (I wish there would've been Hydrogen) to make requests to Shopify API.
At the beginning everything was going very good but little by slowly I was feeling worse and worse working like that each passing day, which shouldn't happen to any employee.
That was one of our biggest difficulties we had since development experience became too uncomfortable which led us to losing time, lower quality of our services and a team unmotivated for keeping working.
And yeah, maybe in your company you never have done something like this, but the real problem is not the technology we use, but if we're thinking in our comfort or not.
This applies to everything, the way we write and organize our code, the methodologies we use in out team, how is our process to build a product as a team, and so on.
Every "cheap decision" makes our work a little more difficult, and if we never stop they add up over time and we end up spending more energy just to keep maintaining our projects without losing efficiency.
All because we never thought that there could be a better way to do everything. This also doesn't mean that can't make these decisions, the thing is just to learn how to recognize when we are able to improve something and work as a team to do it successfully.
Organization and order are essential for a team
One of the things I liked about this company was that they didn't conform with just providing services for third parties but also they used to look for creating their own products and services where due to our low number of employees everyone had to be involved as much as possible providing ideas and new points of view.
We was trying to get others financial sources so the company started to create new projects and spread our attention among many projects.
We were few people and each of us was working on 3 - 4 projects. As you can imagine, tech teams are just a group of people and no matters how good you can be there is always a limit for humans.
At some point we progressed with some projects but also we had to finish some features for another one, the deadline arrived and we ended up without finishing anything.
Again, always we have to prioritize our comfort. A small team with people focusing in only one big project can make much more progress in that project and make more money with it than the same team divided in several projects.
A team needs order, methodologies and no uncertainty to give the 100% of their energy.
Conclusion
We always can learn from our experiences and this wasn't the exception. I'm glad to have experienced this because now I can understand a little better the things that I have to avoid at teamwork to provide real value to a company. I hope to help more Junior devs who are starting their Journey to become a Senior in the areas they want. Thanks for reading :)
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