From teaching to programming (#2)
This is part 2. You can read part 1 here.
My first work as a software developer is to write automated test scripts. There was the honeymoon phase - I wrote a lot of code, review a lot more. I feel like I was impacting so much. And I love my team members too, they were wonderful people and I learnt a lot from them, from the technical leads to the developers to the manual testers. I would say that’s a great first start.
But time passes and my work got repetitive: Most of the work was just writing Javascript code to test the UI,and sometimes I got to tweak the automated test CI/CD pipeline a little. All the cool work like designing a generic class or hooking up dependencies to the codebase was all given to the seniors. At first I thought it was fine—“Yeah those are tough tasks, better let them handle them”—but even as I got more experienced, I was still assigned tasks that cannot tell what I am capable of.
I did not realize how hungry for recognition I was. Granted, it takes time to shine, granted, I need to speak up, yadda yadda… I admit I should have done so, but there was something that barred me from doing so. A different need, not to shine, but to be more of myself.
Ever since I was a kid, I have always been impatient. I was impatient to get my Christmas toy, impatient to have my favorite dish ready, impatient to get what I can get. Now I’m impatient to prove myself, not just to people I want to improve but myself too. I always felt a temptation to create, to build, to leave a mark. That way of showing off myself.
So I made up my mind. I want to become the software engineer. Not just writing automated test scripts to test something that is built. I want to be that person who builds stuff for people to test. I want to see my work come to life and cause a ruckus. Work that proves my capability and my thirst for creation.
The transition was quite long: I built many web applications to show that “Hey, I know what APIs are, what RESTFUL is, where to connect them to, and I totally can take on more dev work.” The GitLab commit history was densely purpled. I was committing diligently. Saturdays and Sundays spent clicking away the keyboard, feeling like I lost myself into colorful variables and statements.
The dedication paid off. I got my title changed from Automation Test Engineer to Software Engineer, and the dev work felt refreshing. I finally got to build things (sometimes I still have to take care of the testing pipeline) and I was so satisfied of my work.
And that’s how I got here. I love my journey so far. I have not regretted a single second learning how to program. When I was done writing this, I felt like there is still something to tell, like it’s definitely somewhere in the back of my head, but I don’t know what it is. That restless feeling might be the key reason why I made the transition from teaching to programming.
