10 years back, I was offered an SW Engineer job by one of the big companies in Pune - Cybage. It was just my 1st interview in college. I had very little interest in coding, zero goals, zero awareness of the latest tech. But everything fell into place as if someone was writing a script.
Just like my life before entering into the tech industry, I had a very good(with twists and turns) journey once I entered; with a mix of hard work, luck, good managers and majorly the thirst/desire to learn new things from people around me contributing to my unimagined success.
Developer ☝️
I was hired as a Java dev. While getting trained, I came across JavaScript and jQuery. Being in a big IT company in India, the career path usually has many twists. Mine too wasn't that straightforward. While I completed my training, there weren't any Java teams left with a vacancy. I was pushed into a team to develop a JS-based learning game for school kids. But then, jQuery fascinated me so much that I convinced my leads to use it instead of vanilla JS. It might seem a naive decision right now(I was naive back then), but vanilla JS had very little developer friendliness at that time. I completed the project in no time, then another and then another. Within a year and a half, the impact I made in my projects gained much appreciation from my managers and suddenly they started calling me king of JavaScript!
I also started getting into .NET tech stack in my free time. This is when I came across the term full stack. This was in 2014-2015, there was no full stack boom then 😃.
I came across a beautiful quote earlier in my career which I made my mantra:
Work, until you no longer have to introduce yourself.
I also started contributing to stackoverflow to keep up with JS/jQuery. I liked helping people new to JS. It was a win-win situation as it helped me widen my JS skills too.
Leader 🚀
By now I had many goals in my career. I had a clear vision and desire to become a pro. This, paired with the best manager around me was a match made in heaven 😃. 3 years into my career, I was allowed to lead a small team. Whatever success I've had till today is 50% credited to my boss's faith in me. I've seen talented people struggle in a big org just because of lack of inspiration.
A bad job with a good boss is anytime better than a good job with a bad boss.
- unknown
It was a big challenge, tech stack was new - AngularJS+Node+AWS Serverless, the team was new, the serverless cloud had no silver lining, but in the end we nailed it. The challenges that I faced in this project made me get more serious about mentorship. The next line of leaders, developers shouldn't feel any lack of help in my presence. With this is started training and mentoring juniors, taking focused sessions on JS basics and learning along with it. Tried to lead by example, and achieved great success in it.
By now, I had left .NET, gotten full-time into Angular, NestJS, monorepo, PostgreSQL, snowflake, MySQL, AWS, Tableau etc. and widened my technical scope.
Architect - Enter 2022 👶
Lockdown disturbed the balance of work and life. But, it provided me with some free time to get into mentoring and consulting.
By 2021, I got promoted as Techincal Architect. A big role, with more responsibilities and its own set of challenges.
Honestly, I had very little experience in Architecting products due to the nature of the projects. But it was all about grabbing the opportunities and making the most of them. I assisted and consulted on many projects with architecture, planning, builds, optimizations and everything that would help me gain more exposure to the latest tech.
monorepo was a great introduction by our onsite Architect a couple of years back. We made full use of it in managing our private npm libraries - both angular and node. He introduced me to many such tech like serverless, NestJS etc. Another person who had a major impact on my technical career.
I also spent some time reading and implementing RBAC, Identity provider auth, state management in angular and many other things javascript.
But the most important highlight of 2022 was becoming a father. A life-changing personal event. Within no time my family went from - the unwanted noise of me smashing the keys of my keyboard all day, to the sweet sound of my baby hitting the keyboard 😏. The random characters he typed into notepad++ seemed more meaningful than the lines of code I'd been writing for 9 years. The kid is attention-seeking, but not as demanding as the technical debt carried over the years in my project. Started working on many such tasks in 2nd half of the year.
By the end of the year, I also started writing on Hashnode, thanks to #techtwitter. I plan to get more into this. The online tech community has been very inspiring.
2022 was okay in terms of technical growth, nothing substantial, but impactful.
Plans for 2023
Help people in whatever way possible
Get into writing technical blogs
React has been on my radar for a long. It's time.
Build a personal website, code+no-code.
Open source contributions.
Some things happen for a reason. We should embrace them and make a positive impact. Tech industry has infinite opportunities and challenges. The goal should be to keep ourselves updated and make the most of it.