This was my first week as a software engineer (professionally)🥳!! Super exciting! I recently got hired as a software developer at Wursta. Wursta is an agency that recently opened up its Web3 side of the company and I’m the first engineer hire (that’s kind of scary). Despite the pressure that comes along with being the first hire for our Web3 department, this week was in general, pretty straightforward and not as daunting as I thought. In this article, I’m going to go over the experience that I had in my first week as an engineer! Becoming an engineer is a dream come true of mine and I’m excited to share this journey with more people, which is why I’ve chosen to document it. I want as many people to be inspired, learn from my mistakes, and find the road to their dreams as possible!

I’m going to do this in bullet points instead of headings because I feel that it’s more sufficient, so here we go:

• Day one (Monday) - On my first day, it was pretty typical. I got my desk set up - my monitor was still boxed up (they had just got some new ones in) - and I got settled in. As a developer, my first thoughts were “when will I get to code? 😂”, but of course, it didn’t work like that. At around 9:30 am we had our daily standup. That was pretty cool! I was able to be a part of my first standup! I had heard so much about standup (the good and the bad haha) and I was pretty stoked to actually take part in one. To say the least, it was pretty…underwhelming lol. Literally, all you do is tell what your status is on a particular task, or where you might have been stuck on a particular task. Think of it as an update on what you’re doing. I’m a part of a pretty small engineering team - it’s about 4 of us (looking to hire more) - so as you could imagine our standups do not take long at all. For me, this was kind of just a welcome session. Everyone on the team introduced themselves and gave a little bit of a background about who they were and how long they had been with the company. During standup, my manager said something to me that was very frightening but exciting, he said “oh yeah, Orlundo, feel free to grab one of the tickets that you see on the Jira board”. That kind of terrified me because I really had no idea what that meant, I had never used Jira, and I didn’t know what it meant to “grab a ticket”. Everything was so new to me but I was sure that I would be guided in the right direction. The rest of the day was pretty much just HR stuff and getting familiarized with the codebase. Since I work for an agency, there is no one set codebase because we have different clients, so they require different sets of code. But, I just began to study the codebase of the current client that we’re working with. That pretty much drove the rest of my day, so needless to say there was no code involved on this day. As a whole, the day went by really fast, but I was super happy that I actually made it through. It gave me the confidence that it wasn’t going to be so bad being a “new guy”.

• Day two (Tuesday) - The next day was a bit more intense. Idk why I walked in with this feeling of something was expected of me. Like, there was a feeling that I needed to take on every ticket on the Jira board (or at least be able to explain what the solution to the tickets was). It was unnecessary pressure that I was putting on myself. And I think part of it was because there was no clear direction for me that day. I knew that I had my daily standup, but the rest of my day was clear and free. I immediately went into the mindset of “I’m not doing enough”, “this is not what they hired you for”, and “you should be picking up some tickets”. So I gave in to that pressure and looked for a ticket to pick up. Now, I had some great help around me, my coworker was super helpful in getting me acquainted with the things that I needed to pick up a ticket. Part of me was really eager to get started and part of me was having the feeling that I described above. I picked up the most basic ticket (or what seemed like the most basic ticket) and after getting my environment setup, I started working on it. It was a quick feature that I had to implement using stylized components. I thought that using stylized components was going to be a quick and easy thing - it’s not - especially when you’re coming into a codebase that you’ve never seen before. You have to find where everything is and figure out how everything connects to one another. Most of the code that was written was written by one of our teams who was currently traveling (actually coming into the headquarters in Austin), so there was no way to get in touch with him and ask questions about how the code was working. So, I spent most of my day banging my head against the code trying to figure out where to put the stylized component that I just had built. That feeling of needing to conquer the entire Jira board went away as the day went on and I realized how the flow of things works. I think part of that feeling was coming from not knowing. Not knowing what it looked like to pick up a ticket, not knowing what it would be like to pull down the code, and not knowing what is like to code in a professional setting in general. But, once I started, all of those feelings subsided. In summary, I didn’t get finished with that ticket and I was ok with that.

• Day Three (Wednesday) - Work from Tuesday carried over into Wednesday (Yep, still on that ticket) but thankfully, our teammate that wrote the code, was finally in town. Now, I could ask him about the code and we could all go over it together. It didn’t work out as smoothly as I thought it was going to work out because we had a good amount of meetings that day (one thing I noticed throughout the week was the number of meetings that you have as a developer). It seemed like there were syncs/meetings at almost every hour of the day. You never really realize how much meetings and things like that take up your time until you look up and realize that the day is over. During the latter part of the day, I was able to catch up with my coworker and we chatted about the issue that I was having with the code. He informed me that there was going to be a different route taken to get the desired result. Instead of using a single stylized component, we would be using a library instead. Since this was the case, I kind of stepped back from the ticket and began to study the codebase of an NFT project that I would be working on. In addition to studying the codebase for an NFT project that we were getting ready to work on, we were gearing up for our Web3 reveal. This is where we were going to reveal to the entire company what the new Web3 venture would look like and what we would be doing. I was asked to express to the Web2 side of our company what Web3 was (oh boy!). So, we (myself and our Web3 team) were pulled aside by our manager to do a quick dry run of the presentation of how we would do our big reveal. This being my first week, and being asked to speak in front of the entire company was daunting, but I knew that I was up for the task simply because I enjoy talking about this space.

  quick sidnote: The company that I work for is an established web2 company that is opening up a web3 side of the company. So, some of the projects that we have are web2, and as time progresses it will be more web3 projects. Ok, now back to my first week.

• Day Four (Thursday) - Thursday really seemed like a high-intensity day! So much happening at one time! The final designs for the NFT project that I was expected to work on (minor changes to the original designs) were finally done and handed to me. I had to speak that day to the company about what Web3 was and how it would affect the company. There was a ton happening and on top of it all, I got my first deadline. So, my product manager wanted to have something to show the client as far as improvements to their website. So, I needed to have something to show the client. Now, this wasn’t a hard deadline, it was kind of a nice-to-have that my product manager requested. It was intense and challenging because I was trying to understand the codebase as well as meet the deadline that was set. I was banging my head against the code for most of the day, getting nowhere. On top of that, it seemed like I had meetings back to back. Whoever said that as a developer you spend most of your day in meetings and only a portion of it coding was right. I was in back-to-back meetings and trying to get the code for the project right. Not to mention that I had to speak later that afternoon. I was surprisingly calm throughout the day though. I remember my product manager pulling me aside and saying “dude, I’m not stressing you out, am I”? Part of me wanted to say “a little bit 😂” but I carried on to say “no, not at all. It’s ok”. And that was genuine. I wasn’t necessarily stressed out but there was a sense of unspoken pressure that was felt. Turns out I wasn’t able to meet the deadline, which was a deflating feeling, but I had to remind myself that this is my first time in this position so all of it would take some getting used to. What I love is that my product manager didn’t come down hard, he was very understanding and let me know that it was not a hard requirement to have it done by that time. Moving forward in the day, it was time for our Web3 team to present and do the Web3 reveal to the company. When it was time for me to present, I simply gave about a 2-minute high-level overview of what Web3 was, because there were many who didn’t understand what NFTs and the entire space were about. I would definitely say this part of my day was a success, despite not being able to meet the deadline needed. Thursday ended well, with enjoying a happy hour at our headquarters and meeting my new co-workers.

• Day Five (Friday) - Friday was a little less intense, but it still had its intense moments. A new day, brought new challenges. I was able to get unstuck on the issue that kept me from meeting the deadline (S/O to Waxy from the DevDAO) but now, there were other issues that my product manager was pointing out to the team that required fixing. It seemed like every time I would fix one thing, another thing would show itself and become an issue. The plan was to deploy the NFT site live on that day, but we were running into so many underlying issues that it did not happen. I was working from home this day so I didn’t have the luxury of having someone next to me to ask certain questions. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to deploy on Friday, but we’re expecting to ship things out on Monday so long as the improvements are approved by our product manager. Once this is shipped, this will be my first professional live production code so I’m super pumped about that!

Overall, this week was a bit of a mix of excitement and a feeling of accomplishment. Yes, I missed a deadline, but in my first week, I was able to stand up before the entire company and talk about an industry that I love with my dearest heart ❤️. I wrote code that was merged into the main branch and that is set to be deployed as a live site, and I began my journey working in my dream job. God is good! And I’m ecstatic to see how far this journey takes me! I want to continue to document the process, it may not be a weekly thing but as more significant events happen. I want people to be inspired that they can embark on this journey as well! I love y’all! Stay safe!

P.S. I want to say thanks to everyone on Twitter who chimed in and gave some incredible advice on my first day! Y’all are awesome!!