My First Developers Job

Originally posted in December 2023 on an old blog site.

Hey everyone, it's been about a month since I last wrote, so I figured I would give a short update on what has happened since then and what I have been working on.

In short - I got my first Developer job! I started last week as a Pega Developer for the contracting job I'm on. If you have not heard of Pega, don't worry. I had not heard of Pega either before I started.

Pegasystems is a low-code application platform that allows you to create Business Process Management (BPM) applications for your business. Instead of writing a lot of code and connecting/moving data with code, we use more drag-and-drop, drop-down selections, and other GUI-based configurations to create the application and manage the flow of processes. There are areas of the codebase that use code, and it's all Java-based on the backend.

While it's mostly GUI-based, there are still if/else logic, 'when' rules, and the 'and &&' and 'or ||' operators as well. Pega also has 'Activities' which are little algorithms built into the application to handle mundane tasks that can be automated without human intervention. Learning coding fundamentals with Python and JavaScript definitely helped me to understand the way Pega operates.

The first few weeks has been mostly writing unit tests for various features in the application and performing some tests myself. I have been able to take on a few user stories and have received a lot of help from the team.

Outside of the job update, I'm continuing through the Computer Science path on Codecademy and have almost finished the Python section. One of my goals in 2024 is finishing the Computer Science path, and I'm also starting to dabble in AI and machine learning. There is a Tensorflow course on freeCodeCamp that I'm slowly getting into, so maybe I'll build my first little AI soon.

Anyways, that is the big update. I'm excited for 2024 and will try to be more consistent in my blog posting too. See y'all soon.