From zero to leading a team - 1 year as a Software developer at Radicali

I am a software developer. I have been doing this seriously for little over a year now. I look back at the journey in this article.

Where it all started

After a few months of internship and an extended full time at Precept labs, I sat down and re-evaluated I am doing. The tech stack I was working on, was on a downtrend, We didn’t have full visibility of the product, neither we had a great mentor nor a good package. The only option I saw was to quit. I started learning React at that time. Well, I actually spent time learning so many things but forgot most of them due to no usage. However, that’s a discussion for another day. I started applying for jobs where I thought I could fit in. I was not getting a good response initially.

I learned from my mistakes

I was doing MCA but I did graduation in biochemistry. Definitely, my academics were not impressive for a software developer job. I knew that I am good at CS, good at coding and good in other aspects as well. But I was not getting a chance to prove that I knew. My resume was never making through the first filter process, I guess. Then one company responded. They asked me to do a project. I had 18h to work on a full-stack app with some tech I hadn’t hear of till then. I took the challenge. I was selected. But I wasn’t happy with the offer. I had hosted the app on Heroku and uploaded on Github. I decided to add this project to applications from next time. To my surprise, I started getting a good response. I worked on a few more projects, college mini-project and some open source contribution helped me stand out.

Joining Radicali

I was always interested in startup and along with the fact that breaking into top companies is not a joke. I thought I could grow more on the tech side in a small team. I would also get a chance to have a close look at the w’s of running a business. My targets were startups with a smaller team but someone with a good tech background to mentor me.

I applied to Radicali purely based on the co-founders and engineering lead’s profile. I had no idea of any compliance team. Terminologies in the domain were so alien to me. I was definitely not in for the product. It was only by 2nd months things started making sense.

First day in Office

I started on time and reached around 9 am IST. Our engineering lead at that time used to work from 7 am IST, so she was there. We had to carry our own laptop. I had a couple of calls with the HR/Operation manager, CTO and CEO, followed by a git lesson by the lead. I had already worked on git so wrapped up pretty quickly. Finally, I was assigned the first task.

We were starting a new project from scratch. There was not even a single line of code. The lead bootstrapped a react app with CRA and pushed to bitbucket. I pulled it. For the first tasks, I was supposed to read through material-ui docs and typescript and just render anything on the screen. It was a real easy one. Done really quickly. In the meantime, the lead was setting up typescript. Now I was asked to set up the linter. Which I did. Followed by some research on how to implement dark mode. That was day one.

The thing I would go back and correct on day two

After listing down a couple of approaches to implement dark mode, we went ahead with using CSS vars and switching their values based on the current theme. But material UI was already providing us with a dark mode. I was not a decision-maker nor I stand for my point. I still feel it sometimes. But now looking back the lead was also very new to the framework and on top of that, the designs were not made following material specs. I would have been better served with antd.

I started standing on my own

I felt superior to our lead in Javascript, React and overall front-end development. She was smart and had worked with multiple tech stacks, had experience in working with all kinds of people. But she lacked the deep expertise on the tech stack of the project. I was left in the forest to figure out stuff which she couldn’t. I had to wake over the night to read and go through docs, books. This came to hurt us later as docs and books only go so far. But it was a plus for me, as this gave me the opportunity to show my skills. Show what I was capable of. She was still managing the project but I started owning the tech now.

I started leading it offically

It was after 5-6 months when our lead decided to quit the onus was on me to lead the team and take the project forward. I found it tough initially to lead the project. But slowly I started to improve on communication, deliverables, management, delegation, managing tech debt etc. On the tech side, I improved the review cycle, introduced ci stages for linting and testing. Held workshops for the front-end team and a few general programming workshops as well. Introduced best practices. Take care. I onboarded a new developer a few weeks after that totally virtually and it went really well. Slowly I started taking interviews for internships and front-end roles.

And it was time to move

Somewhere around June-July, I felt I wasn’t improving as a developer. I felt like I am hitting a wall. There were so many factors to it, team, feature velocity, product requirement restrictions being the most prominent ones. I gave myself sometime before making a decision. I talked about these things with the CTO and started inducing small changes but saw no improvements. So, I decided to move. Next place for me was to work on some other tech or to go deep in the current stack. Building for a large audience was also very important along with some people within the team who can guide me. It didn’t take long to find the place.

What am I proud of

There are many things. But helping my colleagues grow or grooming them has to be no 1. Followed by my contribution to company culture. I always encouraged people to speak up. Stand for their points. I see people doing this more than often now, so I am really happy. But this is also the result of the conscious effort of our co-founders. I am proud of all the challenges I stood up for. I would consider, I did good really good job if no-body remembers me once I leave because they are forced to do so - by code, by lack of knowledge, visibility etc. Maintenance and ownership are such huge part of a software project. Time will only tell how I fared in that phase.

There are few things which I would have done differently give another chance. But I will discuss them in a different article. Until then take care. Good bye.