Photo of Julius Boating and Sprout coworkers outside of Calder’s Flamingo statue in downtown Chicago
Learning how to navigate through
the various codebases and building a mental model of how different services interacted with each other was a steep learning curve. Since Sprout’s core business is software, its architecture is heavily shaped by its business luxembourg phone number data requirements. As I was ramping up, I had to be aware of the business problems developers were trying to solve and why previous architectural decisions were made.
Initially, I was a bit intimidated
that pull requests required reviews before they could be merged into the codebase. Understanding that the main purpose of code reviews is knowledge sharing and maintaining code standards helped change my perspective.
Going through code reviews has helped sharpen my technical skills and improve the quality of my pull requests. Having peers give me advice on what to change, introduce me to new patterns, and point me to relevant areas of the development of a visual component codebase has been really helpful. Reading the pull requests of other engineers has also given me valuable visibility into other services that I am not directly working on.
There is a prevailing idea
that as you enter new stages in life, your previous experiences no longer matter. Once you enter college, your high school experiences no longer matter. Once you enter the workforce, your college experiences no longer matter.
But something that is often overlooked is that our experiences, knowledge, and habits have a compounding effect. We usually are only able to achieve new things thanks to the work we’ve done before. The knowledge and skills that italy numbers I previously gained have greatly influenced how I approach new challenges as an entry-level software engineer.
The classes during
undergrad that had the most direct impact on my day-to-day work at Sprout were Programming Challenges and Database Concepts. The former taught me how to break apart large problems into smaller pieces to solve them more efficiently. It helped me become more intentional on how I structured my code and improved the readability of my code.
Database Concepts taught me
fundamental relational database concepts and covered topics such as database schema design and SQL. I learned how to write queries, which has been extremely useful since I frequently need to query our databases to solve problems or answer questions.
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