Late September of last year I decided to take the chance of posting out of the team and project I was currently working on! I've been on the project for two years and the colleagues I got to know well were also posting out of the team. I saw this opportunity to get myself back into the interview routine. Decided to stay internally with my current employer and try a different division/project/software stack. During my post out season I learned some valuable about: networking, projects, team culture.

Networking

An old college body within my employer informed me about a position open on his team who was seeking a developer senior developer on their team but that I should apply for the open position and see if I can snag the promotion. Seeing the opportunity that was made available I decided to share the open position with my fellow teammates and submit my own application for the promotion. Within couple of days I received an invite for round 1 of the interviews which covered some of the behavorial and experience questions and introduction to the project the position is for with the program manager and the projects technical lead. Within a few days following round 1, got an invite for round 2 with the project team manager and business manager where we had a fun time discussing podcasts and practicing my pitching skills. Turns out whithin a couple days I got the position my friend recommended to me but did not receive a promotion but a lateral move. This whole process really brought home how strong having a network has on ones career. The more people you have in your network the more opportunities you have available to you when needed.

Project Stack

My former team was developing a Create Read Update Delete(CRUD) RESTful API micro-services for a legacy Content Management System(CMS) using the Java Spring framework leveraging Pivotal Cloud Foundry for deploying the microservies to production and testing environments. Within the team I leanred how to deploy applications efficiently to production, how to leverage frameworks develop RESTful API, and developing/integrating pivotals gemfire caching services to improve content delivery speeds. None of the skills really transfer well over to my current project that requires me to develop analytics system in python on Amazon Web Services(AWS) Elastic MapReduce(EMR) clusters. But one thing I loved about transitioning to a new project is the fact I am attacking a new problem for a new set of clients. With the new problem comes a new mindset and a new approach which really brings me outside my comfort zone and puts me at a new angle for a problem and solution that was already in place.

Team Culture

Another impact of my transition was going from a big team to a small team which had a lot of advantages for my skills:

1. Pair programming with more developers to understand the project architecture more
2. Getting well acquainted with the team and understanding who was the point of contact for each part of the project

In Conclusion

Posting out of my first professional project was a fun experience and taught me alot. The amazing opportunities that come from networking with other people, the change of problem increased my approach to problem solving and increased my utility belt of tools I could use in my career, and finally the smaller team and the culture it created really made it feel like home as I switched from a huge team. I encourage everyone to take that leap to switch projects and try something new to see what lessons you can learn from jumping into something different.

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