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I went from hacky hobbyist programmer to working on core business logic for a startup that eventually the whole company would rely on. I was mostly a one-person
by rpgwaiter 2y ago
I went from hacky hobbyist programmer to working on core business logic for a startup that eventually the whole company would rely on. I was mostly a one-person team at the company, and I kept a lot of my bad unscalable tendencies from making small fun projects. No formal testing, very little documentation, hundreds of “TODOs”, breaking API changes without really telling anyone, no QA process, no monitoring/reporting, etc.
It all came to a head when my employer was demoing some software that used my API and none of what they were trying to show worked because of multiple unrelated bugs in my code, causing us to lose this very large client. I somehow kept my position, worked with other departments to formalize QA processes, and started regularly communicating with the API users.
Before I was just making software for nobody with 0 stakes, the reality of having actual people, entire revenue streams dependent on my code being reliable didn’t fully register. At my previous (and only other at the time) employer I was basically a paid seat filler. I spent a lot of work hours making personal projects, it felt like going to work and getting paid to make hobby code.
I’m glad I was able to learn from the experience and it didn’t put me out of work or anything
- punkspider 2y agoThis hits a little too close to home right now. Only a week ago have I felt that I did a few things to actually make an impact. And this only because it seems that the CEO noticed I can spin up prototypes to validate ideas before passing them to the actual devs. I've worked with him for a total of 3 years however, and during that time, most of the time I felt like I was tinkering without making a real difference. The only time that a bigger project was implemented that I had the lead on felt like a fluke and it was after probably 6 months of working on it.
- fifilura 2y agoWould the code have been there and the demo have happened if you had done everything by the book?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- roncesvalles 2y agoProbably more of a humbling moment for the CEO. They just demo'd something without both conferring with the devs and doing a practice-run themselves?
- lostlogin 2y agoThe sledge hammer to the cyber truck. Given that everyone knows that demos have a nasty habit of going wrong, what kind of madman tries something without testing it first?
- 93po 2y agoThe sledge hammer was fine, it was the giant steel ball that was the issue. And it was rehearsed many, many times - the issue was that the window was slightly rolled down during the demo, making the window lose a lot of its rigidity. And was sort of a moot point anyway since the production version didn't wind up having the same "armored glass" that the prototype did.
- satvikpendem 2y agoFunny to see this comment which is in stark contrast to the current top comment [0]. I suppose in reality it's all about balance. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40557571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40557571
- coolgoose 2y agoI think it's a bit more nuanced. One complains about enterprise level architecture in run of the mill small projects. One complains about bugs, which should just be covered by tests, nothing that should sound or be complicated.