I have always loved computers and when it was time to start building projects I made random projects to understand how programming works. Like many other starters I got web design jobs at ridiculously cheap prices but I really didn’t care about the money. I was enthusiastic to put my knowledge to use and have websites on the internet that I’ll proudly say were made by me.
My first experience working with a company was with a startup company of about 5 employees. I loved the flexibility of working with a startup as there weren’t any strict policies like clocking in and more of the regular things you get from large organizations. Don’t get me wrong I am not saying I hate protocols in large organizations. I haven’t worked with any large organization because the ones in my reach are not what I dream of. While there are many more large organizations I’m willing to work with, I have pursuits that need to be attained before taking the application steps. I’m only prioritizing to make myself the fit candidate at the expected time.
I worked at several startup companies and finally had a chance to take on a freelance project after I left the last startup to relocate temporarily. In the various startups I’ve worked with I’ve gone from using PHP to Ruby-on-rails and because they are startups there were times we didn’t have good enough frontEnd developers to take over application frontEnd. For this I took on advancing my frontEnd skills beyond what they were and I followed up with blogs and podcasts that puts me in the best practices. I used methods like BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, and namespacing in CSS. I have also had to use various JavaScript frameworks and some animations on the frontEnd.
I have an eye for design and I follow up with frontEnd community but I really love to do a lot more backEnd development. Following up with the FrontEnd community made me more aware of performance and now I try to consider performance on every part of my development. I have been programming Python outside of the web for so long that it gave me the comfort to explore Ruby after switching from Laravel PHP.
Ruby is easy to write and it is against everything I used to be till I understood software development better. I thought I needed to go back to writing my own machine code, I thought I should build everything from scratch to feel like an elite developer, I thought re-inventing the wheel was what geniuses do. It turned out I was wrong. Geniuses find solutions to existing problems and solve them in the fastest and best way possible. Ruby-on-rails uses convention over configuration which saves a lot of writing of code. In my days as a Ruby developer I’ve written lesser code than I did when I wrote PHP but I’ve done a lot more than all the PHP code I ever wrote with the less Ruby code.
There’s way too many amazing things about Ruby and the ruby-on-rails framework. What I love most is the way assets pipeline helps me handle performance in its own way. I also got introduced to TDD by skimming the Rails documentation and I haven’t ever thought of going back on testing.
I considered everything I’ve gathered from using all the mentioned technologies and thought for a second What can I call myself? . Well, I’m a polyglot programmer or if I’ll use the buzzword, I’m a full stack developer. I needed more freelance jobs and I sought out to find more when I saw a tweet that led me to Toptal.
Toptal has the best freelancers you can find and if I really need to get hired by the top companies then I have to be with toptal. The chances are really slim as it is often said that the screening process is tough (so tough that only 3% applicants make it). I’m hoping I’ll get a rails engineer/full stack position. I will have my first interview today and I really hope it turns out fine.
Besides toptal being a reputable company to be associated with, I love that they make developers write blog posts. I love writing and I think one way we can spread discoveries and get back from our community is by blogging. The blog posts have educative comments that are both useful to the blog writer and to the other readers.