DevOps Engineer to Backend / Fullstack Software Engineer - 1 yr update

comment after comment after comment this is wrong you should make this more dry this is convoluted bubble oh my gosh this is how they're gonna see me like i do i don't even know if i'm doing this well enough like they're gonna regret that they hired me like [Music] hello and welcome back to my channel if you don't know me my name is sosa if you do know me i am so so sorry for this long hiatus i've been on i started a new job started quote unquote it's been about a year but i've been focusing on this new job i moved as well i just have a lot going on and a lot of different moving pieces and so it's taking me a little bit of time to kind of settle down and settle into things but i finally feel like my life is a bit more stable now so i can come back and give you guys the content that you so desperately have asked me for maybe not desperately but yeah i've been asked to to come back on so i'm super excited to be able to get back into this and i'm excited to tell you about how this year has gone so far for me i talked a bit about this in my one of my previous videos i talked about previously being a devops engineer but feeling like at my last job i wasn't being as challenged as i would have liked and i think a lot of my work wasn't as software engineering or development focus which is like valid it's devops half of the work or maybe more than half of the work is ops in the other half or less than half is dev and so i think a lot of my day-to-day was spent doing operations work and collaborating with different teams and being able to prioritize build and just devops related cloud-based things which was cool and really great skills that i was able to pick up on but i felt like after three years it felt like i i had hit my ceiling there like what i could do and i think an another part of it was i didn't really see that there were many growth opportunities for me there after about the three years i'd already kind of moved through the promotion ranks fairly quickly and so um at a big company that i was at before it was kind of unheard of to get promoted every single year and so i was looking at being in another position for like four or five years before i could even be considered to get promoted again so with all of that in mind of not feeling challenged not doing as much software engineering development work as i wanted and not feeling like i had a great place for growth i decided that it was time for me to move on and i started looking back in i think january of 2021 um and then found a new job in march of 2021 and then started in april and then it's literally been about a year since i've been at that job and so i moved from being in a devops position to doing back end at first but now it's a little bit full stack which i actually like fairly well from moving to devops to full stack slash back end work it has honestly been a really good experience i think part of why i really wanted to do this was because again i've been in my position for three years i felt like i don't i really don't want to pigeonhole myself to just doing devops type work like although i really enjoy this work although i really like infrastructure and cloud-based things and learning aws and all these other like really in-demand skills i felt like after three years i really need to do something else just to know and figure out what else i might like within the software engineering realm and i think like for people who are like earlier in their careers this can be like really important so that you can figure out what you like and what you don't like in your career and in software engineering in general like for the most part most of us are going to be working for a super long time so if you're doing this for like 40 50 years and you never really stepped outside the box to figure out what you really like and what really challenges you in a way that you can keep up with then you know you're kind of doing yourself a disservice so i wanted to try something new essentially and so uh in this job i am my title is a back-end software engineer and but the really cool thing about my team is that we are pretty much full stack and it's a very broad stack which i really like so you can kind of have your hands in whatever you want basically like i was working on micro services and i built a micro service early on that like handled like a big amount of data like we're talking thousands of pieces of data that come in every second and so being able to make sure that the microservice that i had built could scale for the amount of data that we were bringing in was really important it was some like really cool design work that i got to do and like implementation work as well on top of that like working with kafka which is like uh how these messages come in and then how we're able to take them from craft gun and then do with them as you as we want and like push them through the rest of the our pipeline just being able to work with a more modern stock and so besides you know working with kafka besides working on different micro services and go i've also done some data processing stuff so we have data jobs that run you know every so often uh some will run every couple hours some will run every couple days and so being able to work with that has been cool as well and then most recently i've actually gotten to do a lot of front end work and so that's been really cool because way back when um i worked on a side project that was primarily just front end well of course it was full stack but i had to learn a lot of front end on the fly and learn react in javascript and all of these other really cool front-end languages i'd done some work in the ui space by myself where i had nobody like really reviewing my code or anything like that so i was able to pick up some things but not in a professional way and so it was really cool to be in this new job and have people who have been in the industry for years and whose specialty is like literally front end and so they can help me you know really craft my skills and better understand uh react best practices and things like that and so i learned and am still learning so much about react javascript and html css stuff like that and so that's been a really cool experience as well being able to work on production ui things has just been like it wasn't something that i had gone into this thinking that i would do but i'm really glad that i've had the opportunity because again what i was one of the main things i was looking for in this change was that i get to do something different and so i've gotten to do some back end it's really cool to be able to also do some front end and so that's been really great one of the most challenging parts for moving from devops to back end i think for me was having better code style and getting back into the groove of coding every single day and i know that might sound a little like what are you talking about like you're a software engineer or you were doing devops work that's still deaf and like yeah but i think in reality you know at my previous job i was coding every week but like not every day and a lot of the code that i was writing was like scripts and so i was writing maybe tens of lines you know like every other week or so like maybe i was i was writing a script with a couple with a couple lines in it you know i had other people on my team who weren't necessarily from a software engineering background and so they weren't as able to give me the tips that you know i would need to become a better software engineer but they were incredibly helpful when it came to operations and devops you know in general like building release type stuff but when it came to software engineering best practices i was kind of left on my own now transitioning to a team where it's just like straight up software engineers they've been doing this forever i've had to kind of also get over the feeling of feeling like an imposter like i didn't belong like oh i only do like like i'm not good enough for this or whatever and i felt that too when i was in my devops job but like now i felt it even more because i felt like oh i'm like so behind on like all these really key software engineering skills that i should already have like my code isn't as clean as it should be or i'm leaving comments where comments shouldn't be or you know i have this long if statement like it like there has to be a way to condense this so i think that was the hardest part was just like at the time because of my previous job i felt like i was a little stagnant when it came to my software engineer like core skills and so moving to this new place i kind of had to play catch up and you know like i remember my first pr that i put out like my first pull request where i was adding um a new feature to to one of our bigger products i had over a hundred comments and you know people sending it back to me to like review and requesting reviews and things like that like comment after comment after comment this is wrong you should make this more dry this is convoluted bubble oh my gosh like i like i remember being so stressed out from that person from that first pr because i was like this is how they're going to see me like i do i don't even know if i'm doing this well enough like they're going to regret that they hired me like i'm not that good of an engineer and then you know you learn from from all the mistakes that you make and and as you go on and you know i got some really great feedback on that first pr and with that feedback i'm able to iterate continuously on the work that i that i do now and i still use the feedback that i got from day one to improve on day 365 right so it's been a really good learning experience overall and you know although it's still hard at times i feel like i've finally like made it over that hump of feeling like not as good enough you know maybe not everyone will have that experience like maybe they're i know that there are other people who have had devops jobs that are like more like software engineering focus but you do but you also do ops but like they're both of like similar importance if that makes sense and so you'll have like that better balance and i think at the last job i was that i just didn't have that balance and it was okay you know it was like again i really enjoyed the job i enjoyed the people that i worked with they were incredibly smart when it comes to devops and build and release stuff and um it was just that i needed to now nurture the other the other part of me that i really wanted to nurture which was like the more software engineering development focused side um and so i'm really glad i did that so okay i talked about what was most challenging so what do i enjoy the most so i went to like a small liberal arts school and a lot of the focus was on reading and writing which i really liked and so i have a ba a bachelor of arts in computer science and you know i loved my software engineering computer science courses but i also like the classes in which i could like do a lot of reading and writing which was awesome and i think that because of all that experience of four literally four years of just reading and writing it's really helped me a lot today when i go to do technical design docs which is like the first time that i've done that in my career like coming here i had to figure out how to write a design doc for new features that we wanted or that i need to build and so i'd have to be able to design it and you know talk about what this product was going to do in a way that not just i would understand but like the rest of my team obviously and then people outside of our team so like product managers and designers and other teams um and so making sure that this doc was able to kind of reach a bunch of different audiences and so that was really important and i actually really like writing in technical design docs and writing papers in general i've always really enjoyed i don't do it as much well now i do it more which i which i really like and so that's been i think one of my favorite parts and then also being able to collaborate with the product managers on their prds has been really cool because i get to kind of have a say in what the future that we're building is going to look like and be able to advocate for the customers which is really awesome as well being able to put in my two cents and that i'm not just like getting requirements and then having to go build it it's like no like as an engineer you still get a say into how this could work and and how this could play out for customers and for users and so that's also been a really cool experience i think in general i just really love the cross collaboration that i get to do between you know engineering and product managers and designers and marketing and business marketing and all these other people that all come together to make sure that whatever feature we're building is going to be the most successful that it can be in that it can really hit these users who needs uh and so that's been really cool is to be able to have discussions with a bunch of different people and to be able to network and get to know people and you know i did a little bit of that at my first job but this is the first time where i feel like i've been a lot more engrossed into you know the success of a product and being able to be the person to drive that success and in order to do that i have to be able to interact and communicate with a bunch of different people and so that's been a really cool experience as well and so to round this out um what am i looking forward to i think honestly i'm looking forward to being able to kind of hone my leadership skills i think i've gotten a little bit of that in leading a couple of different projects within this last year but it will be nice to continue to do that and for me i'm kind of like on the path of like trying to get to senior software engineer and so that's like really the goal that i have set for myself i don't see a lot of people that look like me in that position and so it would be nice to be a representative to other you know pocs and black women especially that like you can be a senior software engineer and i know a couple but it would be nice to have more and so being able to kind of lead the path there would be awesome i think i'm just really excited to to be able to take on more responsibility at my job here and to be able to kind of grow and figure out what i want along the way you know so i don't know what i want to do after you know senior software engineer or do i want to like try to aim for stuff do i want to try to become a manager i have no clue but yeah so that was me and i promise or i don't know if i should promise i am going to make an effort to make more videos i think that they won't they definitely won't be focused on my job specifically because i don't for privacy reasons i really don't want to you know talk about specifically what i do but i can kind of talk in general as i've been doing about software engineering and you know getting to a point where you feel comfortable in being a software engineer and kind of just like learning and we can like learn together like because i'm again i'm still early in my career so i'm still figuring it out so you can be part of the ride and figuring it out and we can figure it out together is that what i was trying to say i think that's what i was trying to say anyway i really hope you stick around for the next one and i really really hope that you forgive me for my long hiatus i'm super duper excited to be able to continue to make videos for you so i'll see you in the next one bye you

Channel: Sosa

Views: 3,576

Keywords: woman in tech, women in tech, black female engineer, software engineer, sosa, software engineering career, full stack developer, devops career, fullstack software engineer, backend software engineer, devops to backend software engineer, devops to full stack software engineer, what is a full stack software engineer, what is a backend software engineer, backend engineer, fullstack engineer, full stack web developer, web development, software development, software developer

Id: wJqlP_KcULY

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022