Intro

For this blog series I've teamed up with @emmarslight/@SlightEmma to give you an insight of what it's like starting your first job in tech but on opposite sides of the world!

Im in the UK and started in my role as Developer Relations Lead for Veeqo on the 18th January 2021.

Emma is in New Zealand and also started her role as Apprentice Software Engineer for Next Chapter Studio on the 18th.

Each week well be giving you the low down of what we learnt, what its like being part of a virtual team and of course any advice for getting and starting your first role.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or tweet us @lauracharvey or @SlightEmma and well do our best to answer them in the next post.

Laura

Who am I?

I'm Laura, a career changer at age 29. I just started my first role in tech after graduating from the General Assembly Software Engineering "bootcamp".

I wrote about my journey here:

My journey through space, time and tech (so far).

lauracharvey Aug 19 '20 15 min read

#beginners #codenewbie #career #watercooler

and here:

How I went from newbie to dream role in 225 days...

lauracharvey Jan 15 11 min read

#career #codenewbie #beginners #webdev

What my new role?

Im working at Veeqo as Developer Relations Lead.

DevRel has existed in large tech companies for a long time but is now being adopted by smaller companies and therefore becoming more widely seen in the industry. The role itself can vary greatly from company to company but in my role, I will be looking after the Veeqo public API, improving on it, making error messages easier to understand, ensuring the documentation is top notch and also improving relationships with 3rd party developers, making developer experience the best it can be, offering them support with queries and speaking publicly about Veeqo and our API.

What's Veeqo?

Veeqo is a platform for e-commerce retailers to manage their business, we integrate with companies/platforms such a Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, Royal Mail, DHL, DPD, Xero and Quickbooks so e-commerce retailers can manage things like buying, selling, returns, picking, packing, shipping, inventory and accounting across multiple channels.

For example, an omnichannel retailer has their own Shopify store but they also sell stock through Amazon and Ebay. They can make Veeqo master of stock and control all 3 stores through Veeqo.

Not all retailers want to use Veeqo in its entirety or they may want to integrate with some in house software they already have, thats where our public API comes in.

What was my first week like?

Monday

Starting a new job from the comfort of my living room was very strange, I missed finding a new coffee shop on my new daily commute and getting those first day butterflies, but it was also nice to feel at ease straight away.

Veeqos onboarding process was a breeze and as someone who has started in lots of temporary positions over the last few years it was a breath of fresh air to see how seamless it was from job offer to first day.

They posted all my equipment to me the week before I started and also sent my logins for my email and HR portal so as soon as I logged in, I had access to various meeting requests and the company Slack channels.

My first meeting of the day was with my manager, she gave me a brief introduction and laid out my onboarding plan for the next 4-weeks, Veeqo is a platform of many parts so I will be spending a week on each section initially.

She also suggested that I use my self-learning times to learn Ruby with the aim of building a small application using Ruby and the Veeqo API once I have got to grips with it. I was also told that every Friday afternoon our engineering team get time to work on side projects and/or learn a new topic.

I was assigned my Coffee Buddy through Slack who is another employee of the company assigned at random, I am looking forward to meeting them this coming Monday (25th).

Also, the third Monday of January is known as Blue Monday and is said to be the most depressing day of the new year. To help everyone feel more chipper our Head of People created a whiteboard and asked us to tell our colleagues why we love them. It was really beautiful and uplifting to see the messages of love and really helped me feel like Id chosen the right place in Veeqo.

Tuesday

I spent time with the Support Manager going through an overview of the platform and understanding what 1st, 2nd & 3rd Line Support do. The morning was spent on a Zoom call with a platform run through and then in the afternoon I was given a list of tasks to attempt in the platform as if I was a retailer such as setting up an order or creating a new stock item.

Wednesday

I watched some videos going over the platform in more detail and certain things that are more challenging to achieve in the platform. In the afternoon I shadowed someone from 1st Line Support while they were dealing with customer queries.

Thursday

It was my first day dedicated to self-learning. It felt nice to be trusted and have the autonomy to structure my learning myself. I spent my morning going over some more product videos, the developer forum and learning some Ruby.

I was assigned my Veeqo Buddy who is now my go to person should I have any problems. We scheduled catch ups for Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Friday

Another day of self-learning but with a few breaks for meeting members of the team.

My first meeting of the day was with my Veeqo Buddy, we had a really nice chat for half an hour about both work and non-work-related topics.

I then met with the Head of Sales and had to wrack my brain for non-technical ways to describe APIs, Developers and Developer Relations. We chatted about my role and how it might link in with their team and what they're working on.

I had a quick Slack chat with the CEO.

Then in the afternoon I met with Head of People who just wanted to check in to see how my first week had been and make sure I was settling in well.

I finished off the day learning about Hashes and Symbols in Ruby.

Summary

My first week was great, Im learning more about Veeqo as a company and their product and Im so glad I made the decision to work with them. Im excited to get more stuck in but I feel like Ive got a lotttttt to learn first.

Looking forward to heading back to work on Monday (its been a while since Ive said that!).

Emma

Who am I?

Emma... a proud Kiwi, living in Mount Maunganui, NZ.

A year ago almost to the day of writing this I wrote my first line of code. Up until that point I had little interest in computer programming and certainly never considered a career as a software engineer something I would want to pursue. I'll write a more detailed blog post about how I ended up in tech if anyone is interested, but here are the highlights..

With a goal to learn what was involved in building a website (Im a nerd, I like to know how things work!) and the discovery of websites such as edX and Coursera (offering free, college level courses) my adventures in online learning began. The first course was a basic Computer Science 101, a good introduction to how computers and the internet worked but I wanted something a bit more challenging. Which led me to the (infamous?) free Harvard CS50, Introduction to Computer Science . Although there were definitely moments where I felt out of my depth, I also discovered there is nothing like that feeling when you press enter, your code runs (after days spent debugging) and it passes all the tests successfully. Hallelujah!!

Deciding that software development was a career I wanted to pursue, I enrolled in Enspiral Dev Academy's 14 week web development Bootcamp, graduating at the end of September.

Since then I have met great people online, read articles about web development, watched youtube videos and tried to code everyday. In the end all the hard work payed off and I was offered a job a couple of days before Christmas(2020).

The job...

I am working as an Apprentice Software Engineer at Next Chapter Studio.

Next Chapter is a new creative agency of around 10-12 people, 5 developers + our tech director and the rest are product/graphic designers. We are a remote company with everyone living in different parts of the country. Although the company is an agency with the design team working with different clients, the software team has a single client and are working on a large project for the foreseeable future.

The first week...

The week before I started work I had received my company laptop and had along with all the necessary logins for the company online workspaces(bit.ai, Google, Jira, BitBucket and Miro). My weekly schedule was setup in google calendar with a link to each zoom meeting already filled. I had also received a fantastic email from the tech lead welcoming me to the company. The email outlined what to expect on Monday and he gave me a couple of tasks to complete during my first week of work. I couldn't ask for a better start to a new job let alone a whole new career.

Monday:

I got up a bit earlier than usual, actually dressed up a little (even though i would be working from home)and put some product in my hair. Then logged in to my my first zoom meeting of the day.

After a brief meeting with the Tech Lead, there was a company wide meeting at 9:30 where everyone reconnected after the weekend. After introductions and learning what everyone's favourite desert is, I was surprised to find myself playing Pictionary.

In the company "Masterpiece" space on Figma (where every work of art is preserved for prosperity!) we played a couple of rounds of Pictionary. Everyone is making guesses from the first pen stroke... a lot of fun, and I think it will always be a great way to start the week!

Following this i met with the Senior Engineer for the project I would be working on. We had a chat about the tech stack that the project used and that I would need to become familiar with the CMS that is used, a piece of Open Source software called Strapi. I was then given a list of articles/tutorials and videos to go through so I could learn how to use Strapi with a Next.js application.

The Rest of the Week:

The rest of the week I spent going through the tutorials and docs for Strapi and when I needed a break from that, I tried to familiarise myself with the code base of the project.

I will admit at times i didn't feel like I was at work, sitting on the couch while watching youtube videos or reading articles has been an almost daily activity for me for months now!

That is not to say that I was given a task on Monday and that was all the contact I had all week. There are 3, 15 min stand-ups a week for the engineering team to learn what everyone is working on that day, ask for help if needed that sort of thing. I also had my first 1 on 1 meeting with my tech lead, obviously as it was my first week we just spent the time getting to know each other a bit, and talking about the goals of the project.

The only other thing of note for the week was a meeting with one of software engineers who has been working on the project since the beginning. It was set for Friday giving me time to start going through the code-base and forming a basic impression of how things would fit together. It worked out brilliantly, I learned how each of the repositories fit together and about some of the complexities that come up trying to get a project to production.

Lesson of the week:

You are not expected to hit the ground running, contributing code and adding value to the company in your first week on the job!! Give yourself time to settle in, get to know the people you are working with! No one expects you to know the ins and outs of the code-base week one!!