I stared at the spinning Mercedes logo on top of the building outside my window for an hour or two. I didn’t expect that it would be this difficult to write an article than to write code. I browsed around in Confluence to check how the Chromedia people created their previous articles but it didn’t make me feel any better. In fact, it just made me feel more pressured seeing how their articles were cleverly created with a touch of professionalism. I concluded that this was way beyond my capabilities. How I wish I was born a cat! Those ninja-like, cute-looking creatures who always just play, sleep and have nothing to worry about given their nine lives.
My experience in Chromedia as a new developer so far has been awe-mazing and full of learning. My colleagues are all smart, fun, and easy to work with. My work schedule has been great! Progress reporting isn’t too stressful nor time consuming. Do I need to mention about the unlimited food in the pantry? Amazing!
Spoke Health
When I was hired, I first started working on the Spoke project, a revamped version of MEDtrip. All of the technologies used in this project were beyond trends and conventional coolness. Most of them were a bit new to me such as Symfony, MongoDB, ReactJS, TypeScript and every other interesting technologies that every rockstar developer would want to learn.
However, my involvement in the project is not worth bragging about since I was just tasked to change a few lines of codes to switch the database connection from mongodb to MySql on some sections of the admin site for database migration. In my opinion, the reason behind using it was the complexity of the data to be managed. Examples are making complex queries, frequent updating and modifying a potentially large volume of records and everything else that a Nosql database would no longer be suited for. Thus a relational database like MySql would perfectly fit the task.
I also worked on financial computations but it was not what I expected. I thought it was going to be difficult like the crazy computations on a whiteboard you see in a movie but all I had to do was implement and transform the existing formula into codes. The good thing about it was that they already created the formula. I am thankful to our project manager, Mign, and one of our senior programmers, Kuya Harold, for the assistance they provided whenever I needed clarification and explanation on the formula.
Most of my tasks in Spoke was fixing bugs and making improvements. Even though I did not get bigger tasks in Spoke, I still learned a lot from it, especially our best practices in programming. In fact, it triggered a feeling of excitement and drive for me to stay focused and improve my skills so I can keep up with the team.
Styleteq
Most of the good stuff and exciting experiences happened when I started working on the Styleteq project. It is a mobile app project like Instagram where a user can post images and comments on them. It also has a messaging functionality. It can search users and photos very much like Instagram.
At first I was a little uncertain how I would feel towards the project because I was not familiar with the language used. However, I also got excited since it would mean I would get to learn a new set of skills again.
Swifting through Swift
I was assigned to work on the iOS version of the app which meant Xcode and Swift would be my new mates. I had zero experience in this type of project and technology. Everything was new to me and I struggled at first. As they say, “beginning is always part of the work”. Eventually I started to get a hang of it.
My first task was to make minor text changes and guess what? I fixed it! Haha. It felt like that moment when a newbie programmer first creates the most difficult program to write, “Hello World!” I am looking forward to getting that feeling again, one of the most satisfying experiences in my software development career, as I continue to explore and further develop my skills in Chromedia.
