When I decided to try to write a book, the only certainty I had was that I was not an expert on a lot of topics I wanted to write about. So I knew that to make sure I was writing a book that was correct regarding the industry standard I would need to study… a lot. For instance, I have a whole chapter dedicated on software developers: expectations for each phase of the career, the myth of the superhero developer and the “soft” vs “hard” skills.
Being a software engineer at a new company—anywhere—is hard. The codebase is completely new, you have to adapt to new patterns (for both code and culture) and most likely the problem space is completely new to you too.
Many many moons ago, I wrote a blog post about what was like in my first 6 months at Stripe. Since then, a lot has happened including a whole pandemic and me spending every free hour writing my own book. Because of that and many more things, I never got to write a second piece to what I was initially hoping to be a once-a-year kind of blog post.
This week I was asked to tell a little about how I became programmer (or at least, I’m in the process). I wrote this text to tell a little bit more about my story.
This month is my 4 year anniversary of my first job as a developer. During this time I’ve had multiple jobs (startups, big companies and open source projects) and changed countries and continents. I was able to learn a couple of things that helped me improve my career and I wanted to share them as a celebration of my anniversary and everything that came with this new life.