On Becoming a Developer

The Jorney so far

Until about 4 or 5 years ago programming was a thing I only heard about. One of my best friends is a senior programmer and often he'd bring up something about programming logic or show an article he would have written for a local brazilian publication.

I always found it fascinating, but until then I never had the energy to start studying it. My work at the time was very demanding and on top of that I was studying Psychology at night. So I had no time for what I thought would be a hobby.

Psychology turned out to be not the thing I really wanted to do. Politics were inserted in almost every subject and the teachers sounded more like politicians than scientists. That was not what I thought psychology would be like, so I left.

In my now free nights I started to learn Python and it's most used libraries and frameworks via books. The first one I picked up was called "Automate the Boring Stuff" by Al Sweigart.

I had always found web develpment really insteresting and so I started learning Javascript and Vue after tinkering with Django and Flask for a while.

After some time I realized that if I learned this stuff properly I'd have a superpower.

I quickly started to learn everything I could about programming and started applying the knowledge in my day-to-day work at moteefe.io.

At the time I was working in fraud detection and prevention and everything was very manual. I started building tools that pulled data from our database and use Pandas scripts in Google Collab to present that data to my coleagues and make their jobs easier. I built scripts that made my job much easier and faster. The time I spent learning Python started to payoff!

At the time Moteefe has reached the limits of what a Ruby on Rails monolith could do and decided to change things; they'd build a new platform, this time using a microservices architecture. The monolith was closed and I was promoted to the Supply Chain Team.

On the Supply Chain Team I quicly learned the job and started to automate everything I could again. That caught my manager's attention and he started pushing the Tech Team to find a role I could expand those programming skills further. That's how I started working with the Range and Reach Team.

The Range and Reach Team (R&R) is the team responsible for researching and developing products. The process encompasses a lot things. From transforming raw product data from spreadsheets into database entries to working with image manipulation, like making any image fit in a shirt mockup or making images bend around a mug.

That job demands a lot of programming skills I didn't have when I started, but have been learning in the past year I've been working with it, thanks to the amazing team I work with.

That about covers it so far. This is how learning programming in my free hours helped my carreer immensely.

Thanks for reading!