Intro
I've worked for One Young World, my first tech position, for around 1.5 years and it would be beneficial to look back on what one has achieved before it's a distant memory!
When I reflect on this new role, I feel fortunate to have been given such an amazing opportunity when I had little knowledge or prior experience in the web development sector.
Getting to Grips with Drupal
I learned to collaborate in a small development team to help maintain an ageing website using Drupal-9 as the content management system. The company is undergoing the discovery process and hopefully will deliver a revamp of the site content using Drupal 10 and a partially decoupled approach to enhance user experience. Effectively, I had to learn (in my opinion) the CMS with the steepest learning curve! A tall order for an apprentice! But after 6 months of working mainly in a site builder role, I was familiar with the Drupal admin UI and could efficiently support the business by producing page content using Drupal's page builder module (Layout Builder). I helped to iterate and produce the following pages of importance to the organisation:
I became more competent in how to perform specific tasks independently within the Drupal ecosystem - mainly by leveraging the core and contributed modules. For example, I created a list of National Board Chair Leaders (link above - and further National Board Members which can be viewed per country) using Drupal's Views module, to query the database for specific content types, filter them by specific criteria and render the data on the front end by altering the default Twig template markup and imposing my specific styles using Tailwind CSS class names.
Source Control
I had to learn (with a lot of mistakes) git version control and took the immediate steps of listing out the terminal commands for the build of our local environment along with the git commands to push a new MR branch, into a Notion Doc. This was so different from working on small, independent, pet projects when no one is there to challenge your commits or decide how to go about feature branch-based workflow. This was an interesting challenge learning how to navigate safely the git system and something I'm still learning as the code I work on becomes more complex. I still use that Notion doc to this day.
What was daunting was how complex maintaining a production site can be which I don't think one can appreciate from learning independently or in a boot camp. On the plus side, it opened up many avenues of niche learning which would help make me a more rounded developer or at least engage in meaningful discussions on aspects that were not directly related to programming, but influenced our business goals.
Rapid Prototyping a.k.a Hacking-it-together
I find that we spend a lot of time trying to take advantage of third-party, paid or open-source integrations to facilitate our workflow or expedite other teams' processes. I wouldn't have this sort of exposure working independently: using automation software like Zapier to create "if-this, then-that" situations mostly to reduce manual input saved us from admin-related repeated tasks. I gained an appreciation of work management software like Atlassian's Jira ticketing system (along with that Agile principles, scoring of tickets, standup meetings, sprint planning and retros). The organisation now uses Monday.com which pulls in "task boards" which are highly customisable and visually aesthetic. More importantly, you can view other team's boards so staff are accountable for task delays.
I'm a firm believer of "don't reinvent the wheel". I'm happy to say that the organisation is fixing information-related problems by leaning on other providers' solutions rather than trying to reverse-engineer a similar solution to reduce cost. We are looking at using Google's Cloud services to manage the increasing number of scholarship application submissions we receive year after year. We aim to query the data on Google's more advanced infrastructure and provide data visualisation to inform other teams so they can identify trends in the data.
We are building an automation from our CRM Salesforce, which holds conference attendee details, to our digital conference platform seamlessly as online attendees, without our team having to manually bulk upload through spreadsheets, which is prone to human error and time-consuming. The automation is actually handled by AWS and we were surprised at the generous free tier - as we are a small outfit it is unlikely that we will hit the thresholds of activity unlike some larger enterprise businesses.
Professional Skills
Of course, working in an organisation means you have to navigate the office politics and personalities of team members. Fortunately, due to having some non-tech experience, this wasn't new to me. From a tech side of things, however, it did make me wonder what the work culture and management are like for startups, web agencies, SaaS firms, govt sectors, large multinational corporations etc. The great thing about the tech industry is once you have a few years of solid experience under your belt, more opportunities are open for you - so if you're not quite the fit for a particular company culture, then it could be time for a change of scenery. Software and the web sphere is vast, forward-thinking and progressive, I take that as an opportunity to explore with open arms!