From Java Junior to Department Manager
This will be a short story about my personal development and how I made it from Junior Developer to Mobile Department Manager in my twenties (27 to be precise).
I was always interested in technology, from an early age I loved to use the screwdriver and pretend that I know what I was doing. Often when disassembling stuff and then reassembling them I have spare parts left. And after a couple of retries, I get it correct.
When I got my first computer at age 7 I immediately fell in love. I played a lot of games, stayed up late, and wanted to make them myself. I also learned how to re-install windows even though English is not my native language but I learned it by playing games and watching cartoons. Later in middle school, I started making small scripts that shut down the computer, create/delete folders/files. I felt like a hacker since that was really popular at that time.
I learned to use popular programs like Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Adobe Flash animations, and other really quick. Everything felt familiar to me, even if I never used a program before I could understand it and use it in less than an hour. Then I started learning programming languages like Pascal, Basic, C++, and others (this was all even before I went to college).
In college, the first programming language that I learned was Java and it became my biggest strength later in life and helped me along the way to become an Android developer. After that, I learned Python, HTML, CSS, JS, databases, continued on the backend with C#, and a lot of small projects in different languages/platforms. Basically I wanted to try everything and to see what is the best choice, the most interesting, to learn the weaknesses and strengths of each.
Then I had the opportunity to learn and use Linux for a project (I was a Windows user so changing to Linux was a big deal). That was interesting for a short period of time and then I got bored and wanted to go back to Windows and gaming.
After finishing college I got my first job within two weeks as a Front End .Net developer. I was working in Visual Studio with C#, HTML, CSS, JS and MySQL Workbench. The funny thing was that thee database had more than thousand tables with no one that knows how it works nor any documentation to help me get started (but that’s how it works with any good project) :D
After a year or so, the company wanted to create an Android application but we had no Java devs nor native Android devs. Luckily they had me, a Java enthusiast and Android “expert” (had a course in college where I built a travel agency app) :D They bought a test device that was popular at the targeted audience. It was a Samsung Note phone, I was amazed that something like that existed, that was the first time I saw it and I’m sticking with them till today.
After a lot of trial and errors, headaches working with content providers, matrix cursor, downloading large database files (~200mb) and pausing/continuing download, asynchronous calls, and syncing UI on the correct thread we managed to build a production version of the app.
Unfortunately for the current company that I worked for 1year and 8months (just a small note, they treated me as garbage), I got an offer as a Medior developer via LinkedIn (I didn’t have an account, but the irony was strong and the CEO wanted that every employee creates an account) :D
The funny thing was that I did my internship during college in this new company and tried to apply for a job as a Java Junior and wasn’t accepted and now they are asking me to join them. The reason was that at that time my knowledge of object-oriented programming was only practical and not theoretical also. And now I got the opportunity to work for them as a Medior Android developer which I immediately accepted.
I continued to grow my knowledge by working with great minds, people willing to help you improve and overcome any issues along the way. I would like to mention that I was shy my whole life and learned from others that if I want truly to improve myself and get to the top positions I would need to change that and to work on my soft skills. As we all know there is not always time to improve yourself at work so I started learning at home also. I had the luck to know a guy who wanted to create a B2B android app so I offered my services at a decent price. But what was more important was the aditional epirience I gained, I got to learn Firebase better, to try out new stuff and everything was paid for :D
After 2 years working in the new company as and Android developer I started to learn iOS and am still evolving my skills there. Android and iOS are prettry simmilar but totaly different, swift and kotlin are closing the gap and making it easier for devs to switch back and forth. But at the and of the day I still prefer Android development and its environemnt.
I also stumbled upon OpenSTF , implemented and maintained it at the office with about 25+ Android phones which made phone sharing easier for more than 20 developers and QA’s. Also worth mentioning, I wasn’t the type of guy who would come to the office, do his job and leave. That was too ‘easy’ for me, I was eager and wanted to do more, to learn more so I always got some extra work like managing the interns, helping other colleagues (even the more expirience once), working on multiple projects and so on.
And now comes the grand finale, my Department Manager was always satisfied with me and saw my raw potential. He helped me to grow, to improve where I needed to do so, he trusted me to do the most important work (and I never let him down). He was working in this company for around 6 years and wanted to switch to backend development, and even though there are people that work longer in the company than me and have more expirience because of that, he still chose to promote me as his replacement.
I got promoted to Senior Mobile Developer after 5,5 years of work experience (I would add at least 2–3 more years on top of that thanks to the time invested in freelancing and learning from home).
Yes, I spent more time at work, did more that I was asked to do, spent my free time to learn but in the end it paid off. Now I’m the Department manager of 14 people (Android and iOS) and I’m trying my best to make good programmers out of them.
Thanks for reading, I hope that you liked it! If you have any questions, suggestions, regards feel free to write in the comments section. Support is well appreciated since I’m new to this!
Comming soon: I will be creating a series of posts about working in IT, what to pay attention to, how to overcome working with different type of people and many more. Hit the “follow” and stay tuned :)
