Meet the team is a series where we introduce our fantastic team members and have a peek at how it is to work at Worldfavor. This week we are happy to introduce Pedro Brás, one of our frontend engineers. Read on and let Pedro take you on his journey of moving to Sweden and becoming a software developer!
What 's the best way to eat an elephant?
This was on the first topics of discussion when I first started learning about software development. The discussion was not how one could effectively eat this gigantic mammal, but rather how you could tackle an enormous task effectively. And the answer is simple: one bite at a time.
Working in a modern and agile tech team is all about constant planning and constant delivery, figuring out how a big and complex system can be built in small and deliverable increments and iterations. Coding is just part of the job. A part that would be aimless if not for everything else.
Everything else is actually the part that makes this job interesting, dynamic and just fun! For that reason that is what I’m going to focus on today: what happens behind the curtains, what makes it possible for our product to come to life.
The commute
I’ll start this with how I start most of my days, with my commute through the city of Stockholm.
Commutes are a downside for most people, but I rather enjoy it, especially being as lucky as I am to live in this beautiful city. And as a lot of times commutes are a space for reflexion, let me give you some background on how it came to be that me and my family moved to this nordic capital.
Living most of my life in my home-country of Portugal, it was always clear to me that I would not stay there forever, and that I wanted to experience what it’s like to live someplace else. Someplace different.
My first step was not a long one, settling in Barcelona, Spain for a little over two years, but its extremely rapid and chaotic pace quickly felt like too much for me and for what I envisioned my life to be.
Longing for a more quiet, organized, and structured lifestyle, the Sweden-idea came to light. And we just went for it. First time I set foot in this country was with all my moving luggage.
As a college graduate in Multimedia Design, the idea to become a software developer was a random one, inspired by a metro ad promoting a 3 month bootcamp that promised to turn your life around. And that it did.
Welcome to Worldfavor
After graduating from the coding bootcamp my first job was to find a job. Most of my colleagues found Worldfavor due to intentions to work with a product and make a positive impact in the world and due to their passion for sustainability. I have to admit that was not my case. It all happened due to a random connection with a recruiter, but I’m so thankful for that coincidental turn of events!
Working at Worldfavor is not like anything I experienced before. Here everyone has the chance to make a direct impact on the course of the product and the company by contributing with ideas and expertise. Everyone is involved. You come to work knowing you’re going to meet a bunch of passionate and highly motivated people that give their best to meet our challenges with a ‘everything is possible’ mindset.
Here to the right is the first photo I took at our old office in beautiful Gamla Stan.
A day in the life
Meet our tech team (or a sample of it due to covid restrictions) in its natural habitat - our little tech room.
Our days start with a Morning stand-up where every team member sums up what was achieved the previous day, challenges they’re facing, and the plan for the day. The purpose of this is for everyone in the team to be aware of what the others are working on and to find collaborations, or to tackle challenges together.
I’m a front-end engineer, and my main job is to create and style the user interface that the user sees, and to build the logic that the user interacts with.
Every feature has a life cycle and a path it needs to follow, starting from planning the requirements of a feature, moving into the design phase where our talented UI/UX designer brings everything to life, and next the actual development begins, started by the back-end engineers followed by the front-end.
But what are we supposed to work on today?
What is the next bite we should take in this massive elephant? We divide our work in two-week intervals called sprints where we grab the features we set out to do and we break them down in detail and plan their development. Each feature is coded by one or multiple developers simultaneously, discussed and planned further if needed, until it’s ready to be merged into our code-base. It’s reviewed and tested by the peers to ensure that the requirements are met and everything is working properly.
At the end of each sprint we have a retrospective meeting to reflect on the past sprint, point out what went according to plan, what didn’t, and how we can improve moving forward.
This process repeats itself over and over until the system is built, or, should I say, the elephant is entirely eaten.
Outro
I could continue describing further intricacies and technical aspects of my work life, what makes my job awesome, tell you about all the great fikas and after-work parties we have, our lunches at this awesome taco place next to our office called La Neta, but for me the cherry on top of the cake is that there’s nothing better than, after a fulfilling work day, going home and enjoying some quality time with the family.
