My First Project Contribution as a Software Engineer
This article contains mainly two parts. First is how I become a software engineer. And the second part is how I adapt to my job and contributed to my first job-based project.
I always wanted to discover multiple areas as much as possible before getting older. So at one time of my life (at the age of 18th), I felt to be a software engineer one day. Completion of one of your dreams from the list gave an experience of a skydive. After you jumped you don’t exactly where you’ll be at. So I’m now in the middle of the sky and surface. But surely I’ll do this in order to land safely.
After onward I learned coding from the assist of people who do the coding. First time I started as .NET standalone application developer. I hoped that I learn much more from this as I nominated to best desktop application category of an award program.
Later in the 19th I learned Java and .NET standalone application development more and did the first commercial release of middle scale ERP system. Next in 20th, I move to web applications to discover more about centralized applications.
So in my 20th, I joined to software engineering degree to learn it the proper way. I would like to describe my studying software engineering much with theoretical parts. But for practicals, I developed projects using PHP, J2EE, ASP.NET, APIs, MERN Stack with OOP and distributed application concepts.
The best thing about those projects is I did those with my defined times and with the few peoples (friends) or alone. So you can always adjust time, resources and tech stacks. But when I joined as a software engineer things changed. Everything is pre-planned. And the best thing is that the company assigned me to an ongoing project. Here I want to point out and group my experience into following sub-topics to give you small advice.
1. Environments — dev, test, and prod
Use version control tools and add proper commit messages. (yes always forget and using one word)
Keep notes if you did changes to the database of one environment. And always keep backup of the database in case you can revert. Something happens to the database as you also start learning things.
2. Agile — daily meetings with the team.
Ask questions from the team. Sometimes I also asked the same question more than once or even twice to clarify clearly things.
3. Best Practices — follow standards and conventions.
So if you are also gonna start a career as a software engineer, make sure to follow the following rules.
Use meaningful names for variables and methods.
se one naming convention all over the project.
3. Optimization — find a best-case
Optimization can gain through code and database side both. So I’m also doing research when it comes to optimizations. Make a habit of search google before you start to code, so you can see how others did that and get their experience if a task does that way.
4. Manage Time
If you can ask someone when you stuck rather than searching it on the internet on hours. Ask from experts. It saves a lot of time. (the time you are wasting X No.of people on the team) Because if you stuck, sometimes the whole team is waiting until you finished a task.
In my first contribution project as a software engineer at the company, is to adapt to the existing developing backend API and go with requirements. So now I’m working on the real business solution that multiple people contributed. As a team member, I have a lot of things to make myself adapt as mentioned above. I think I did that as much as possible. Since this is the first time I have great support from my team to do so.
I have to follow best practices as preceded developers do. Always be conscious about what I’m doing on which environment. Especially working with databases in test and prod environments. So I hope if you’re also fresh graduate or looking into the industry this info will help.
As I learn great things from this project, I learned a small of AWS services and work with them. (that is the next best thing I learn from this project).
At the end of the project release, we work nights to deliver the best. As yesterday is the release of the project’s first version, Now I felt It’s the best thing I had done in my professional career!. yes, it is! Woohoo! Thank you, my team …
