A new year with a New team and How it goes

Image by Anthony Duran

Hey! You know what? I'm glad that you're interested in my experience of switching the project. Let's start with a little story.

Why I switched my project

The idea to switch the project was living in my head for a long time (about 2 years). When I first joined my previous team I was the only Front-end developer and the project was about healthcare. At that moment we didn't have any task tracking system, and the planning was like discussing something and that's it. Sometimes it caused problems that somebody from the team can forget something that we need before release.

Honestly, we had one thing that I really loved about that project is that I was able to decide what to use and what to not. But the problem here is that I wasn't a really experienced, that's why I've always waiting for the time when we'll have a Team lead with some knowledge on how to build a scalable applications.

In a year, I realized that I'm not growing up that fast as most of the tasks was about just showing data from API using any components library. Yeap! No designs...

Then, at last year our team grew up really fast, we've got a new people, QA engineers, UI/UX designers, and so on. But I still felt sad and from time to time I was trying to ask my manager for new projects. Fortunately, my managers are awesome. They helped me to prepare to the interview and I've tried to complete some of them. And one of the last was really successful.

Interview for a new project

The interview had a two steps. The first step is coding challenge with algorithms. To be honest, I've never loved that but the problem that most of the time algorithms was really borring for me. But the task was really fun and I had an unlimited time to complete (I spent about 4 evenings). I drew a lot of in my notebook and I my desk was looking something like this...

Image by Scott Blake

After that I was waiting for feedback and it was positive. So, the next step is phone call. I don't why but I've never had so many emotions after the interview. I still remember that time when I was going home and smiling. Team lead that I was talking to was really kind and funny. I didn't feel like it's an interview. For me it was like a small discussion about Front-end.

After that I've got a message from my manager "Good news. You've been approved". The smile was getting bigger. Two years and that's it!

One month at the project

I started to work on the new project on Jan 10 and now I have a little more knowledge about the team and processes. The first day was hard for me. New people from different countries and nobody speak in my native language. Every single process is new to me, like a new task management system, new workflows, and so on. Very soon I realized that the process is awesome and I like how the team works.

The first thing I always wanted to have is well-documented tickets. At my current project, all tasks have everything that I need to know and it saves a lot of time. The reason why they are well documented is when discussing how to build a feature we write every single question inside of the ticket. Easy, right?

The second thing is unit tests. Now I write a lot of them and test every feature that we build. And you know what? It's saved me a lot of time to build something and it helps to understand how code is working.

The third thing that I've never had is building applications with accessibility (A11Y) in mind. I've always wanted the project where people care not only about business but also about users. So, now I'm going to learn more about that hands on.

The fourth thing I really like is that we don't spend too much time at meetings. All meetings take up to 5-7% of time, so I have more time to work and I love it.

And the last thing is the team itself. Every team that I've worked with is awesome and this one too. The only difference from previous teams is that they're all from different countries. That's feeling when you work with people that live around the world is pretty new to me and it's definitely awesome.

Summary

Every team is awesome. Somewhere it's about people, somewhere it's about the management, maybe even all together. But the great thing is the experience that you'll get from each team. It's not about growing only engineering skills. It's also about improving your ability to work in different situations, with different people and cultures. Every team can bring you some knowledge that you'll be appreciated for. Be kind to people you work with. And change the project if you feel like you need it. It can be really long as two years or it can happen next month. It really depends but the only thing you have to do is smile!

P. S.

Just a little picture that tells everything about your experience!

Image by Ian Schneider