8 months in to my first Dev job

This time a year ago, I was starting to study for my Pega CSA certification exam with a hint that a job on the Pega Developer team was going to open up in the fall. How much has changed in the last 12 months! I studied for 3-4 months, passed the exam on the second attempt, and started my first Dev job as a Pega developer 8 months ago. How has it been you might be asking?

The first few months were stressful. While I had passed the CSA exam, almost nothing from that exam was useful in my new role. Our team uses Dev Studio for 100% of development, and the codebase is pretty large. The CSA on the other hand focuses more on App Studio and higher-level topics. Using App Studio is a truer "low-code" experience, whereas I feel Dev Studio is more closer to hardcoding everything.

I had to ask for help on almost every User Story I was assigned, even though they were on the easier side. What would take one of our Senior Developers a day or two would usually take me several. I've been incredibly lucky that my team has been incredible. Every time I would reach out, they would be patient, explain concepts to me, allow me a few moments between each explanation to write down notes in my personal documentation, and help me finish up a story. I consider myself incredibly lucky to be on a team like this one.

Probably around late April, early May of this year, I finally did my first User Story without asking for any help. It was all on my own. That may have been the watershed moment in my mind that I could do this job. That was around the 6-month mark for me, so for any other Junior Developers out there in their first job, it can take awhile to get comfortable.

I've went through a string of a few sprints where I required little help. A lot of this was due to having UI/UX stories that are for our upcoming move from the old Pega UI-Kit to Theme Cosmos. It's going to be a fantastic update to our app and is much needed. The old Pega UI-Kit look is not impressive and not up to date with modern web-app standards. 

Working on the UI/UX side has been nice. I can see my changes quickly, and when the update actually does go to production, it will be fun to go to the sections I worked on and think, "yeah that was me!" My favorite so far has been updating some admin control pages, since I suggested a different layout for the whole page and was told to build it so our Product Owner could see how it looked. And they liked it! So my redesign idea for the admin controls was implemented. 

Anyways, these have been a few highlights and thoughts I've had reflecting on the past eight months. November will be the 1 year anniversary, and in the meantime I'm studying for the next Pega certification - the Pega CSSA. I took the exam in June and failed by one question (which apparently happens a lot...), so I plan to take it again in September.

I also need to write about my first work conference I attended - PegaWorld 2024 in Las Vegas. I took some neat pictures, and I need to put some pen to paper about the experience. Anyways, that's all for now.