Carlos López

I started in my last year of university as a full stack developer. Here I learned to apply everything I studied and discovered that the working world is far from the theory of the classes. Luckily I joined a company that gave you enough freedom to learn and experiment with the latest tools within the restrictions required by the clients and the company itself. So I had to not only train myself in the latest technologies but also be responsible for the development that I had to do from the initial phase to the launch.

All this was possible thanks to what for me was the most important lesson I learned and that is the value of mentoring. Not only did he guide me through the work I had to do and answer any questions I had, but he also instilled in me the motivation and curiosity for everything I could learn and be interested in.

With that confidence and guidance I was able to develop myself and build a number of nodejs and mongodb api's and react cms's that made me learn the importance of the choice of tools. For example, that most database schemas are relational and that using a noSQL is not going to end well. A mistake that I would later discover is common not only in the decision making positions but also in the developers themselves.

A new opportunity arrived for me when I was invited to work at a startup. Coming from an SME the new and shiny glow of a freshly created company was appealing enough for me to make the change. It was a shoking change indeed as I entered a place with hungry young people that believed in the project as well as in creating a culture that made working there a joy.

On the tech side we also had the same freedom I experienced in the other company that allowed us to pick the state of the art languages, frameworks and infrastructures that we were promised were the best by their hype. We loved and cooperated within the team in the learning process which made it even more fun. But soon enough we ran into a wall of technical debt which we delayed taking care of. This resulted in development delays that even meant that features that were to be implemented on a daily basis could not be implemented for months. This is unacceptable for a startup. Also it coincided with a culture problem in the tech department itself which led to its breakup and some people leaving because of it. Addresing it sooner could have made that the culture prevailed and really good people would keep working there.

A complete refactor was put on the table which I was against of because of the complexity of the infrastructure, the operations and the new solution which included a new tech that no one on the team knew. The refactor was confirmed and the team began to work on it which resulted in me realizing that I was wrong. Just as the company realized that there was a problem and the developments had to go faster I realized that sometimes the solution is to get rid of everything you have worked on so far, recognize that the decisions you made were not the best (with time you were knowing it) and that there are tools that are right for the challenges you currently face in your company. That tool was ruby on rails, not a shiny and cool new tech but a really polished one that made the developer experience a delight and helped us refactor everything in 3 months.

A lot has been learned so far and yet a lot is still to be learned.