How it all started
I started working at Appunite a little more than a year ago. At the time when I applied to the company I was still completing my bachelor’s degree and I had just started learning Elixir a few months before. I had never imagined that in such a short amount of time I would meet so many new people, tackle many problems and learn so much stuff.
My journey started in a logistics project. The project had been in development for a couple years already and was pretty huge, so I needed a few days to get accustomed with it. Fortunately, from day 1, I had full support from my buddy and in the first week I already got my first task. It was pretty simple, but right from the very beginning I felt as if I contributed something and helped the project. In the following weeks, I got a lot of great feedback from my colleagues, which helped me identify my strengths and areas I had to work on. During the month I spent at that project, I learned a lot of Elixir fundamentals and got accustomed to working on a big software project.
Change of environment
After about a month, there was a need for a backend developer in another team at my company. It was a banking application. The project was still in an MVP phase so the scale was much smaller than the previous one. I got to tackle different kinds of problems, such as some dev-ops and software design. For frontend, we were using Elixir LiveView, so I also got to learn some basics of web development, which helped me understand the bigger picture. My first big task there regarded authentication. I spent a lot of time researching the problem. I asked colleagues from other projects how they approached it and got some valuable advice, which helped me finish the assignment.
It was a great experience. I learned how to approach implementing big functionalities and the power of collaboration.
Learning to build apps from the ground up
After about half a year since I started working at Appunite, I landed up in another project, which had just started. Again, a different stage of the project required learning a different set of skills. Among other things, I had to set up CI and CD, as well as some external tools for application monitoring and analytics. Cooperation with two clients who handled different things in the project was another new thing to me. We had daily meetings with one of them, which taught me how to collaborate with people from outside the company and also improved my English skills.
A new role
After about a month into the project, I got a call from my team leader, who told me that there was a new junior developer starting his job at Appunite and asked me if I would like to be his mentor. It surprised me - I told him I’d been programming professionally for a mere 9 months and I wasn’t sure if I was ready. He reassured me that I was capable enough and that it would be beneficial, not only to a new guy, but also to me. After giving it some thought, I agreed and about two weeks later, I met Daniel, who joined our project. I introduced him to the project and during his first weeks he asked me a lot of good questions. It turned out that my team leader was right and this was also a great learning experience for me. I wanted to correctly answer all of Daniel’s questions, which compelled me to learn about many topics and articulate my thoughts effectively.
A fresh start
After the first part of my last project was conducted, I felt I needed a new challenge. I talked to my team leader and after explaining the situation, having my development in mind, he agreed to transfer me to a project, which had started a few months earlier. The goal of the project is to develop a mobile application for the security sector. I liked the idea of this app from the beginning, so I was really excited to start working on it. Another reason for my enthusiasm was that a colleague who helped me with my first big task concerning authentication, was a backend lead in the project. Thanks to his extensive programming experience, I was able to learn a lot of new things concerning not only technical abilities but also soft skills. At the moment I’m still working on this project. We’re getting ready to release our app to users.
Conclusion
Appunite is the place where I started my career as a professional programmer. During my time here, I met a lot of great people and learned from all of them. Working on several projects has taught me how to approach different situations and adapt to solving different kinds of problems. Thanks to this, I have acquired knowledge from many domains and skills necessary to work on applications in various phases of development. I look forward to the next steps in my journey and I hope they will be as exciting and developing as my beginnings.
