It's been about 4 months since I officially switched over to full time development from managing the QA team.
On one hand, I feel a little disappointed that I haven't been able to really develop my frontend skills as much as I'd hoped for, or expected I would have by now. I've only worked on a few small bugs on the frontend and a little bit with our old legacy frontend code. I haven't worked in React too much yet, even though I tried starting work on my own for a small work related React project. It turns out when your day job involves a ton of backend code and running integration tests locally, it takes a bit of time to switch to a Docker profile that is meant for frontend. Doing that every day is just not feasible for me.
So while I'm a little less afraid of curly braces, I don't think I'm close to being comfortable with React and Redux just yet, or with frontend systems altogether.
But on the other hand, I'm pretty proud of how far I've come on the rest of the work -- the backend contributions I've been able to make. I've worked on overhauling the way permissions work in our order related flows and migrating everything over to the new permissions backend. I've also worked on a small project that involved a ton of digging around in our old mobile legacy order flows. And, I built a small admin tool that helps our Support and Sales team get self-service help, rather than distracting our engineering team resources with simple questions.
And I am feeling more self sufficient. I know my way around the code, even the React code. I understand how our dev environment works and how to keep it working and without errors. I like pairing with others to see their perspective in coding, and to have some company, but it's not necessary for me to pair in order to get work done. So I'm pretty excited with how far these last few months have taken me. Now onward, I just want to get some good frontend experience in so I can round out my programming knowledge. It sounds like I'm headed toward being more of a full stack developer, and I think that's fine with me.
