TL;DR
The author took a three-month career break and was accepted into a coding school. He then joined Adrias Online, a web agency, to learn React and other coding patterns. He faced the challenge of learning a variety of concepts within a limited timeframe and encountered various issues. His journey at Adrias Online ended due to differing perspectives regarding his contract, and he learned valuable lessons from the experience. This article is the second of six in a series about the author's career.
After completing my duties at Network Service, I took a three-month career break.
During this time, I was accepted into a coding school, which was possibly one of the first in Italy back then (this experience could potentially make for an interesting article).
Afterward, I joined Adrias Online.
🧳 Yet, another web agency
Adrias Online is another small web agency around here.
It's a competitor of my previous company, but I didn't bother it too much.
🤌🏽 Why another web agency?
Here comes the funniest part.
I joined Adrias Online because of the way they build websites.
They have a custom CMS and CRM built from scratch using React.
Yes, React.
Back in 2018, React was on the rise, and I had never used it until that moment.
This presented the perfect challenge for me.
I am grateful to them for the opportunity and for all the things I learned from some of their engineers.
👨🏽💻My role
I was hired as a regular engineer and not anymore as an intern.
I had different duties, but most of them were around building new functionalities to the custom CMS/CRM they have.
It was super fun as I had to study a lot of new things, starting from React, Redux, Sagas, and also a bunch of different patterns, which I wasn't aware they were existing.
😰 The biggest challenge
The biggest challenge I faced was learning a variety of different concepts, including some advanced ones, within a limited timeframe in order to be productive at my job.
For instance, Redux was popular back in the day (although now I would use it only if absolutely necessary, sorry Redux), and I had never encountered it before.
First, you have to learn the pattern itself, and then the implementation.
It was incredibly challenging, as this was an entirely new concept for me.
But let's face another example: Redux Saga.
Saga is another pattern.
As if Redux wasn't enough, let's add some more complexity 😂
For me, the difficult aspect of Sagas was that they are managed by Generators, a lesser-known feature of JavaScript (MDN).
🤩 Takeaways
My takeaways were numerous.
Since this was my first experience with a Single Page Application (SPA) project in React, it was incredibly educational.
I encountered various issues with the bundler, React itself, Redux, and a host of related things.
I also made some changes in a few legacy projects with PHP and Twig, and I can confidently say that I won't work with PHP anymore (although PHP engineers claim that it has improved since version 7, good for them!).
🚪The end of my adventure
My journey at Adrias Online came to an end due to differing perspectives regarding my contract.
I initially agreed to a one-year fixed term as a starting point, with certain goals measured by KPIs, in order to transition to a permanent position if I was able to achieve them.
Despite reaching these goals, they wanted to offer me another year on a fixed term.
After some negotiation, I ultimately decided not to extend it.
✅ Lessons learned
I am grateful for the invaluable experience and self-discovery I gained in the industry, learning various work patterns, architectures, and methodologies during my time at the company.
❌ Errors I did
I also made mistakes during this journey.
And yes, we can't expect to avoid making mistakes, as they are bound to happen. We grow significantly by making them, conducting retrospectives around them, and so on.
To me, the biggest mistake I made was not starting the negotiation about my contract before the end of it.
I also didn't have much experience in negotiation, so, lesson learned ✅.
👀 Looking back
Reflecting on this experience, I don't have many regrets, nor can I think of many things I could have done differently.
The challenges throughout the journey were exhilarating, and I had wonderful teammates who generously shared their knowledge.
The only thing I'm certain of is that I could have stayed there for another year. As this new approach to building web applications was emerging, I wanted to learn more and accomplish more. However, the scope for diverse projects was limited due to the company's business focus.
I hope you enjoyed this article, the second of six (for now) about my career.
This series will be a prequel to others focusing on specific topics, so stay tuned and let me know in the comments if you want to discuss a specific section or topic.
🕺🏽 Your lovely neighborhood dancing engineer 🕺🏽