28/02/2022 - 04/03/2022
New job, new beginnings!
After finishing the bootcamp and going through the job hunt phase which lasted about two months, I was fortunate to land an entry level role as a 'digital apprentice' working with a small, but close-knit team of keen developers in a non-profit organisation. The employer has an affiliation with the recruiter responsible for managing the apprenticeship training, which in turn had connections with the IT recruiter that managed the bootcamp I completed. In most industries and at this level it seems, it really is 'who you know'.
How the week went
I was certainly apprehensive to be joining a team of devs who were well-versed in the tech stack, and an organisation and culture I was not familiar with (me being from a corporate management structure). I was greeted with smiling faces and a warm welcome. I had a thorough onboarding and induction process, clearly well planned ahead of my first day and a covid-delayed xmas party as a kind of ice-breaker, to meet colleagues from other teams outside of the office. Not bad for a first week I say!
Brass Tacks
In terms of getting to grips with the tech, I spent most of the time in meetings in-person or remote discussing a high level overview of the website architecture and team responsibilities. The company has a live website where general users (members of the public) can interact with the platform: read, watch content, comment, leave feedback, apply for events and donations. Other teams create and provide content via GUI layout editors in the Drupal back-end. The form fields, styling and functionality is provided by the development team through out-of-the-box solutions as part of the Drupal module library or customisation built on top of other tools.
What was interesting in the layout was that the layout editors concerned the 'body' of the webpage, as the header or 'mast' and footer are handled elsewhere as standalone content editors. This compartmentalisation is probably to maintain consistency across webpages of a particular end-use. More on the workflow details to follow!
Productivity Tools
What amazed me was the range of other software the wider organisation was using to streamline their productivity:
- Loom: video recording software great for capturing complex and abstract problems or even displaying solutions and tricks. It has the capability of showing your camera feed alongside your screen capture and is a useful tool for the remote worker. At the time of writing, Loom has a free edition and can be used as a browser extension or downloadable app.
- LastPass: password manager for online resources. Especially useful as you will inevitably be logging in and signing up to a plethora of services your dev team uses.
- Salesforce: this one is more of a management tool so a lot of its use cases are not likely to be relevant to a junior. But, it does support a ticketing system which can be used to manage tasks set by teams requiring input from other teams. This is good for stopping informal tasks being undertaken and helps document the progress of formal tasks.
- Notion: note taking and documentation app. I love this app- it's a great one-stop-shop for information dissemination with a clean UI.
- Miro: sticky notes board visualisation for brainstorming, general planning and collaboration.
- Slack business communication, and Google Services (Mail, calendar, Drive, docs etc).
- Other tech with more blog posts to come: Atlassian Jira for IT ticketing management and task board visualisation, Storybook Component Builder and Prototyping, GitLab for source control, docker containers, lagoon hosting.
The majority of the week was spent meeting, greeting and trying to remember names! On the computer however, it was about getting the configuration of the local environment properly setup which was not a straightforward process! There are definitely some CLI commands I hope I can commit to muscle memory (and actually understanding what these commands are doing under-the-hood). We as a team need to be getting better at documenting processes, including configuration which could benefit new starters even if it means for a one time process.
This week actually culminated with a company away day for bedding-in new starters and team building events. We also received an introduction to the "metaverse" and the concept of non-fungible tokens in web version 3.0 (web3.0). Suffice to say, it's certainly an interesting topic with a lot that businesses can monetise. How a non-profit can financially benefit from this space was not clear but the take home message was that: we as an organisation, individuals and as a generation may soon be thrust into this new web version sooner than we thought and that we should be pro-active to what it can offer rather than being skeptical or ignorant. Web1.0 was considered nonsense during its inception and history shows that that dismissive attitude was incorrect. Perhaps this is déjà vu?