From Junior Dev to Lead Engineer. Act II of My Journey into Tech.

In Act I of my story, I spoke about transitioning from Theatre to Tech. A learning process that lasted just under two years and landed me a job as a Web Developer. Like a lot of Junior Devs, I was overwhelmed and battled intense imposter syndrome, thinking each mistake would result in termination.

Over six years later, and countless mistakes because, as we all know, no one is perfect, I’m still an Engineer. In fact, I’ve been the Lead Engineer on multiple projects at my company and have mentored Junior Developers in the process.

So. How did I get here?

I’ll share an internal monologue that sums up the experience: “Wow, how did I forget to delete all my console.logs before making a pull request? How did I forget all those semi-colons? I don’t want to go through another code review because then everyone will know I’m an idiot. WOW I just spent half a day debugging a non-existent error because I misspelled the variable name. I truly know nothing. Oh SNAP I deployed an entire application successfully, I am a genius! Whoops, broke production, not a genius, still an idiot. Nice, restored production, not an idiot but maybe not a genius….yet.”

You get the idea.

We built custom content management systems for clients and, having teaching experience, I became the go-to dev for on-boarding and communicating with the end users. I learned Wordpress and Angular in order to perform maintenance work on existing applications and I took courses on Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) on React and Redux as the team decided to build a Wordpress backend with a React frontend for a website contract.

I remember a time in coding bootcamp, one instructor said something like ‘your first year, post-bootcamp, will help you build the tools to become a Junior Dev.’ At the time I disagreed, I was building replicas of Survey Monkey and Yelp, I knew so much. In hindsight, they were correct and the year and a half I spent in this role allowed me to make mistakes (a lot of mistakes) and learn from them, while building experience working on production level code.

When considering my next move, I envisioned working at a larger company. With more engineers to learn from, I felt like there would be potential to fast track my growth. Well, I was half right, I definitely experienced growth but it was in no way ‘fast’. Once again, I felt overwhelmed and this time I was sure I was an imposter. Sure of it.

Obviously, I wasn’t. At the time of this publication I’ve been at 2U inc for four and a half years but I just want to illustrate that it’s easy to feel like you know nothing when you actually have so much to contribute.

Yes, it was a lot, but I knew that I couldn’t learn it all in a short time, and I certainly wasn’t going to fast track anything. Here’s a brief list of what helped at this stage of my career:

My final piece of advice, as I learned from my experience, is take a moment to consider what aspect of development interests you. The team I joined performed a considerable amount of back-end work. While this pushed me out of my comfort zone, I wasn’t always interested in my work. Which kind of sucks for a developing engineer. Two years in, it was announced that my team would be building a new front end for an existing product using React and I remember the feeling of my face lighting up. This was a turning point for me as I always knew that I was interested in the front-end.

I am currently repeating this process, building another front-end for a different application, using what I learned from the previous project. The engineering path is full of lessons and learning. You’ll never learn it all, there’s simply too much information, so find what interests you, be curious, and remember there is always something new to learn.

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