Finishing University was a pretty scary time for me, I went from having a schedule for studying, coursework and exams, to suddenly being let loose in the real world. As much as Universities try to prepare you it’ll never be enough.
I had graduated into a market where some companies were starting to bring people back into the office and some had transitioned to be fully remote, meaning I had to decide if working remotely was something I wanted to do. After working a temporary job and applying for a number of jobs I stumbled across Viva IT.
During my first few days at Viva IT I had been tasked to create a new default loan form using Apollo Flow. This ended up being a great first task as it meant I had to use many parts of Flow in order to meet the specification, learning a great deal in the process. I did however take a lot longer than originally expected to complete the task, in the end taking 3 times the expected time to complete! After this task though I’ve found myself being able to much more easily pick up a task and have an understanding of how to complete it. While I’m still asking lots of (probably silly) questions at times, I am finding myself able to complete a task with much more ease.
One of the things I’ve found great about working in a commercial environment is seeing the concepts I’ve learned about over the past 4 years in the real world. It’s one thing learning about a concept and being shown code examples, but actually seeing these things in the real world is a great learning experience and really helps to solidify my understanding.
Working remotely has been a strange experience compared to jobs I’ve had in the past, my morning commute has gone from 40 minutes to just a few seconds. Working from home has provided other challenges though, separating your work environment from your living environment is much more difficult. Luckily I have a spare room in my flat that I can work from, so when I leave that room my brain can switch into “non-work” mode. There’s a great articles I’ve read on creating a good work from home environment here.
Moving forward I can’t wait to work on more complex tasks and learn more and more about the entire Apollo system.