I have a short story to share with you about my recent journey in leading a complex feature's development for the first time.
Recently, for a project I was attached to, I was tasked with a big backend feature, which involved the construction of a few endpoints in TypeScript for the frontend to query and retrieve data from. That, I thought was the sole scope of the tasks ahead.
Boy was I mistaken.
This was the first time I had to take charge on such a complex feature. I was worried - could I be trusted to complete this task with the accuracy my project manager expected? The stakes were high.
The Story
In the beginning, I felt like the task ahead should be smooth and easy. Just take about an hour to obtain and digest the requirements, jot everything down and plan out the endpoints. Sounds simple.
But the more I delved into this feature, the more complicated it became. More and more requirements, constraints and considerations started to pop up, and what was originally a simple task became a totally different monster. I spent a total of 5 days planning, gathering requirements again, hopping on calls and understanding the user flow more and more.
When the requirements and backend work that needed to be done became quite intense, it felt quite overwhelming for myself. I wasn't sure if I could surmount this challenge alone, as my other teammates were occupied with other tasks at that time.
But slowly, I decided to adopt a different mindset towards this problem. I started to adapt and saw the work as a challenge to myself!
And so I continued planning and designing the APIs for a few more days, and eventually, I managed to segregate everything out into respective components - scheduled cron jobs to update certain fields, cron jobs to update the database based on certain criteria as well as the constructed endpoints all ready for business!
Morale of the story
Overall, yes I struggled quite a bit, but as one of my supervisors once told me, "Sometimes, you have to bring your feet to the fire in order to truly learn something".
This statement has never rang more true and I felt great after surmounting this challenge, even managing to construct quite an extensive piece of documentation along the way.
To progress further in our careers, in life; we cannot be afraid of such challenges! We need to adapt, push through and believe that after all this struggle, we will come out of it stronger! As long as we persevere (which I know can be tough when you are completely lost), we will see the light at the end of the tunnel!
To those who are currently in that position, I want to say, press on! The end is near for your tasks and trust me, the rewards you'll reap from it will pay dividends in your experience and knowledge in the future!
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