2 Years Reflection

It has been two years since I became a full-time front-end developer.

TLDR, I’m still having a great time with it. Not considering changing jobs at the moment.

I’m happy about my company for now. The environment, particularly the people, is way better than the previous one. The last few years killed almost all of my willingness to build bonds with the organization, but fortunately, my team has been chill and respectful.

The pay (and the raises) aren’t bad at all, but there is still a noticeable difference between it with my ideal number. I expect that changing employment will be the faster way to reach that goal, but choosing employers is like buying a lottery, and this place is such a comfort zone it feels like winning a prize.

I was lucky enough to be assigned to build a brand new service. I learned more in the first two months than I had in the previous two years of self-study.

I found myself reading the source code more often when cooperating with the server team or using a new library. I don’t pretend I know anything besides front-end development, but sometimes I get to find the potentially issue-resolving part, even solutions that are not on the documents.

I also feel the way I develop is more organized. Setting up environments and tools, naming, file structure, everything. The biggest change is definitely scoping git commits and pull requests. In other words, I learned how to work with a team, and as part of a team. I appreciate the two patient mentors gratefully.

In fact, “developing as a team” is the absolute prime factor regarding how a developer should work in my opinion, after two years of professional software development experience. I’ve met people who (occasionally) write beautiful code, but I really hate to work with. I’ve also met people who write every pull request like ELI5. I remind myself to do my job like the latter every day.

One of my favorite moments when writing code is when I solved a problem that has been bothering me for a while. I feel extremely lucky that it still goes this way for me to this day.

https://twitter.com/AsukaCHikaru/status/1504403347465715715

Some people say don’t have your hobby as your job; some other people say you can’t write code forever (or even for over 20 years). I don’t know if that day will ever come, but I’m loving it so far.