Hey all,

I am a software developer at a small company where I’m one of two developers. The other dev is primarily back-end and has been working off some basic cloud infra set up by an external company before I joined, so I’m essentially running solo on the frontend, some of the backend, cloud architecture, project management, etc. (really, everything except database management some of the existing api endpoints).

So, what are the best ways to improve in this scenario? How do you prevent a limited learning environment from limiting your growth? Has anyone been in a similar situation and learned some tips for making the best of it? Any ideas?

(Also, I know it’s frequent advice to just say “move companies” but this job is a really unique opportunity, and I absolutely love the company, so I am not interested in doing that.)

Thanks :)

  •  upstream   ( @upstream@beehaw.org ) English
    2•11 months ago

    We are all different, but what can be important is to make sure you keep exposing yourself to new ideas and concepts.

    Ask to be allowed to go to a conference in which you can learn new things. There are frameworks and technologies out there you might not hear about outside of those places. Things that can potentially make an aspect of your job significantly easier and make the project easier to maintain. I learned about Factory Boy this way, and man does it help save time when building tests! https://factoryboy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

    Another aspect is if the scope grows - or the success of your project grows, so does the risk of being only two developers.

    Make sure the business side understands this risk. If you or the other guy decides to leave they won’t find a good resource quickly and would need to rent a resource or go without for a while.

    Also, make sure that you don’t let the fact that you like the job become a sleeping pillow for salary growth. The more responsibility you put on the more you should be paid.

    I’ve been where you are, now I have six devs under me and a project lead. It’s been a though, but exciting journey.

    The toughest part for us has been to push to transform the rest of the company into an organization that understands and cares about software development, and to take technical debt seriously.

    In the beginning the business people were like “I like the funny words you say man”, they weren’t quite so entertained when we needed to spend a small year rewriting an app that got bit bad by technical debt. The interest payments were significant.