A Year and a Half journey with Namshi Tech

Today, I bade farewell to the team and the culture that introduced me to software development. A year and six months have passed since I landed my first job straight out of college as a Junior Software Engineer at Namshi where I had the great, the average and the bad days. I must admit, time has passed super fast.

It was a very exciting journey, from completing my first assignment, changing robots.txt :–), to the latest extra large, super complicated tasks, it was a journey involving lots and lots of learning and late working hours.

I was lucky to join Namshi Tech at a time where migration to a more sustainable, robust and scalable architecture was taking place. After a little bit of struggling with completing assignments on legacy software, Symfony2 kicked in and paved the way of my learning path and ended up to be my most valuable experience. Javascript for me was that nice language I used to manipulate DOM elements, I could not be more wrong! After finally understanding what a directive is supposed to be, I started working with AngularJs and I couldn’t help but be amazed on what it can achieve. Fighting and watching my teammates fight through the craziness of Javascript, NodeJs came into the picture and my first impression was exactly as you might think, this javascript craziness on the server?! But the simplicity and the ultimate performance of this platform proved me wrong again.

The newly employed technologies brought with them a set of valuable practices like code review, code testing and automated testing tools, pair programming and many more which are very important skills for a software developer to pick up.

Attending SymfonyLive London 2014 was a great chance to meet people from the Symfony and PHP community, getting to know the latest trends surrounding this framework and most importantly, realizing that there are people across continents facing the same issues and struggling through the same parts you had hard time working on. The level of passion towards software is just fascinating!

One of the most valuable lessons I learned was that paying back to the open source community is an important part of our job as software developers. During this period at Namshi, I had the chance to participate in Mockserver and shisha.

Finally, words of gratitude go to Alessandro Nadalin for taking a leap of faith in hiring a fresh graduate and going through the painful process of developing him from scratch. I just hope I set a right example. Of course, lots of thanks to the team and to Alessandro Cinelli for sharing their knowledge and their guidance along the way.