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2009 - Becoming a Software Developer

My history as a professional software developer starts at the beginning of 2009. I worked for a development software company called Koby Systems. They provided tailed e-commerce solutions for mid-size companies.

Fiting my interests

Before starting my first experience as a software developer, I was doing my required internship to get my technical degree in informatics at Hostnet, a hosting company very famous at the time. During my internship, I was already looking for full-time positions in the software development industry.

I had been studying several aspects of software development, and I was very interested in web development. Then I found a very nice job description to work on a company that provided tailored e-commerce for mid-size companies, which I would have the change to work on both frontend and backend.

Hiring process

As you can image, I was very newbie about how hiring processes work. But in this company, it was a very standard process:

The entire hiring process took around 1 month, and I was able to finish my internship on a Friday and start my new job the next Monday.

Day-to-day at work

My work consisted of two main things. First, I was responsible for implementing new modules for the e-commerce platform, and second, I was also responsible for developing custom themes for some of our clients.

We had our priority lists of new features that needed to be implemented into the platform, as well as priority lists for each client. We had people assign to new clients or to work on new modules.

We used to apply some agile principles, such as Kanban, MVP for features, extreme programming, versioning, small and often releases.

Working with clients

That was a B2B business, so we had to understand what our clients' needs were and how we would be able to help them succeed in the online market.

I had the change to talk with some clients and also received a briefing about client's needs with the team. Then we would be able to discuss how to implement the best-tailored solutions for each client.

Talking about clients, we usually had to main responsibilities in the development for each client: we had to work on the frontend, applying a custom theme, and workflow and most of the cases, we had to develop custom module due to client's special requirements.

Custom themes & workflows

The implementation of a new theme was a straightforward process. We had a good number of very different themes and workflows so it would be easy to figure out anything.

I guess I started working with frontend in its golden time. The booming of CSS3 features being implemented by the browsers and HTML Element Inspectors being a thing, I had a lot to experience, but I lot to worry about old browsers and their compatibilities as well.

Custom modules

Developing custom modules, at least in the beginning, was a very overwhelming task. The platform was considerably large and having to analyze the impact of a new module, and the pros and cons of each approach were rough.

With time, I got more and more familiar with the codebases, database structure and the job was getting easier and easier over time. That was also a great experience, I had to evaluate several decisions throughout the entire project and I also was able to optimize things in the core platform because of some the investigations I did.

Wrapping up

I worked there for almost a year, and the experience was very pleasant. I had the change to learn tons of stuff, both in the frontend and backend.

I had really challenged myself as a software developer and turns out I was very happy with the results.

Regards,
Renan de Azevedo

Updated at 2020/06/26 12:53.

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