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Mar 05, 2023

A Short Hike is an exploration game about a little bird named Claire who’s on a mission to reach the summit of a mountain. This game holds a special place in my heart and it reminds me of my own personal journey on becoming a software developer.

Taking off 🐦

A few years ago, while studying Industrial Engineering at college in Venezuela, I began learning some computer science basics and exploring some programming languages. After graduating in 2016, I moved to Spain and enrolled in a full stack web development bootcamp in Barcelona. I spent three months learning a ton of technologies (mostly HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Angular and NodeJS), building a couple of projects, meeting some great people and eating pizza every friday. By the end of it, I was already getting some job offers from a few companies, but unfortunately I had to head back to Venezuela and missed out since remote work wasn’t a big thing yet.

Collecting my first feathers 🪶

Finding a remote job was hard, especially for a graduate/junior, but after applying to hundreds of postings for a few months, I was hired to work for a small startup as a junior frontend developer. I got to learn Polymer, built my first components and wrote my first functional tests.

Even though the pay was pretty low and I experienced some stressful moments when my code wouldn’t work, I’m grateful for that first opportunity.

Meeting other hikers 🐰

A year later, I returned to Barcelona and immediately started looking for an on-site position. I had a few interviews, some of which were pretty wild and even funny (might write a separate post about that), and I was selected for a graduate software developer role at ThoughtWorks the second time I applied (yup, I didn’t make it initially).

I went to India as part of the induction process with TWers from all over the world, worked on different projects, with different clients, teams and stacks, I was introduced to the world of agile methodologies and It was also my first time as a full stack developer, getting my hands on the backend, using Go, JAVA and even PHP… It helped me so much to get the full picture and I grew my career a looot while I was there.

Reaching new heights ⛰

After experiencing ups and downs for two years, including surviving half of the pandemic, I moved on to a new job as a Frontend Engineer at Adevinta. It has now been a couple of years since I joined this amazing company but it still blows my mind to know the impact that we have by shipping features that reach millions of users every day.

Alongside my professional career, I’ve discovered that I really enjoy doing 3D modeling, web animations, and digital illustrations in my spare time, which have pushed me to give a few talks within the company but also in public spaces like OSWeekends, where I had the opportunity to meet the incredible Guillermo Rauch and the latest one being at the BarcelonaJS meetup.

The mountaintop 🌈

Overall, I’ve realized that just like in the game, the journey itself is the reward. There have been times when I felt like giving up, because it hasn’t been easy, especially for someone with a different background, but I keep learning at my own pace with the help of extraordinary people around me and on the internet who teach me new things every day.

I hope to do the same with my posts, sharing some tech related learnings or personal insights about random topics, so stay tuned if you’re interested or get in touch at @stivaliserna. The journey never truly ends, but I am ready to see where it takes me next.