Developer Spotlight: Ninjame

(Note: Candidates are anonymised. Ninjame is not their real name)

Profile

Occupation: Software engineer

Years of experience: 7+

Based in: Sydney

Strengths: Full-stack web and mobile app development

Programming languages & frameworks: JavaScript/Typescript, React & React Native, Node JS, Serverless, AWS

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Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’ve worked in startups as a software engineer for over seven years. Now I’m a senior software engineer in an agency. My main skills are in JavaScript/TypeScript, frontend, backend and AWS.

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Currently on your profile it says you’re looking for a side hustle. What kind of side hustles should people contact you about?

I’m looking for any side hustle that compliments my main job and helps me enhance my skills.

My main strengths are building robust full stack web and mobile applications. For mobile applications, I have extensive experience using React Native, rather than native iOS or android. I can also do backend development where I specialize in building API solutions and managing cloud infrastructure. 

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What would be your dream job? 

I currently have two career paths in mind. One is to establish my own company, offering software development services. Alternatively - if I am looking 10 years down the line - I would want to be a software engineering director with focus on people management rather than strictly the technical aspects. I've found that I enjoy my job more when I can empower others, rather than solely concentrating on the software architecture side of things. 

I am interested in staying updated on new technologies, but my true passions lie in motivating and leading teams and establishing efficient processes to help people perform better.

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What would be the perfect place to work for you?

A company that has a very clear vision of what they want to do and a leader I feel inspired by. Somewhere that has good values, gives back to the community, I’m trusted to do my work and I can work confidently and autonomously. A group of people that are smart and challenge each other (healthily) on a daily basis. 

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What makes you unique as a software engineer?

I’m good at empathising with others which helps with building a good team culture and working with other people. 

Also working in the startup scene for seven years taught me a lot about being versatile. So being open to learning new skills rather than just focusing on one. Also being a bit more flexible in terms of changing direction and not being afraid to take up new challenges. If you need someone to pick something up, I’m not afraid to put my hand up and go for it. 

Another good thing that’s come out of working in startups is having the chance to learn a lot of new technologies. In larger companies, you often work with a limited number of technologies and you’re stuck with it. Whereas I had the opportunity to get experience in a lot of different programming languages, frameworks and ways of working.

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I know you are currently happy in your current role, but what might convince you to jump ship?

Like said earlier - I would be interested in starting my own company or going down the managerial side of engineering. So if a company can offer that career path for me and has the characteristics of the ideal company I mentioned - I would consider it. 

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Let’s go back into your history now, what got you into software engineering?

In university I studied Petroleum and Geosciences Engineering. My first exposure to coding was when I took an Introduction to Structural Programming course. I learnt the basics of programming, writing pseudocode, algorithms and a little bit of C++. It intrigued me but I didn’t take it seriously because I didn’t have good exposure on what a computer science career path looked like. I thought whoever studied computer science just ended up doing really generic IT support stuff. 

When I graduated, there weren’t many jobs in the field I studied. That’s when I started looking around and thinking - is there anything else I’m interested in? Are there any other career paths that I can take? I remembered really liking programming from the one or two courses I did take in uni. From there I looked up bootcamps and came across General Assembly in Sydney. After taking their three month Web Development Intensive course (now known as Software Engineering Bootcamp), it took me around three months after the course to secure my first software engineering job. 

It was quite tough at the time because a lot of people didn’t recognise bootcamp graduates. They had that traditional thinking that you needed to graduate from university with a computer science degree.

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What was your first software engineering role?

It was in a very early stage startup, which is not so small anymore. I was one of less than 10 developers there at the time.The good thing about joining at that stage is you get exposure to a lot of things and have more opportunities to experiment. I also had the benefit of having a very supportive team who helped me upskill. 

Originally, I was in a full-stack web development role. After two years, the team had grown to 40-50 developers and I joined the new platform team. On that team, I switched to doing frontend and backend tooling for developers, so they could switch to the new micro-frontend and microservices architecture. We also set up AWS cloud infrastructure and worked with other developers to figure out what they were struggling with so we could build better tools for them. 

After three years, I moved to another startup/scaleup and it’s pretty much history from there. Since then, I’ve worked as a full stack engineer building mainly front-end, mobile apps, web apps, and APIs.

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Do you have any advice for people trying to hire good software developers?

I think technical skills are actually the easiest part to grow in a person. The first thing you have to look into is the person’s attitude. What’s the potential of the candidate rather than what they are offering now. Even if they’re not the best, if what they’re offering is good enough and their attitude is good - they’re willing to be challenged and are a good cultural fit - take that person! It’s not easy to find those kinds of people. 

Don’t just look at the skills. If someone’s attitude is not good, they could have an impact on the team’s synergy and culture. 

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What advice do you have for someone who’s just starting out in their software engineering career?

Don't just look at the money if you're starting out. Look for companies where you can grow your skills and have good mentors who are willing to help you. 

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One last thing, can you share a fun fact about yourself? 

Currently I have two puppies, so my life revolves around my two dogs. I’m a dog parent.