Hi! My name is Aidan, I recently joined BigByte Digital in November 2024 as a Senior Full Stack engineer. I’m writing this blog post to share my experience about being a Senior engineer and talk about all the fun exciting challenges that come with it.
Previous Experience
Before joining BigByte Digital I had worked in various roles across a wide range of industries including Government, FinTech, and Gambling! My passion for software began with that iconic scene in SkyFall where ‘Q’ talks about the polymorphic virus. As a result, I told my parents I wanted a laptop (though I had no idea what one really was), and 10 years later, here I am, working for one of the coolest Defence / Software startups that the UK has to offer!
My role at BigByte Digital
My role at BigByte is unlike any typical position you’d find in a massive corporation, where you’re often siloed into a sub-team working on a microservice or micro-frontend. Here, I get to work on all thing’s tech- and even on some business aspects too!
At the moment, I’m working on a full stack greenfield logistics application for one of our clients. Breaking it down here are some key areas in my current day-to-day work life:
- 🧑🏽 Clients - Working with clients and their employees allows me to perform rapid application development. With the continuous feedback I can tweak, remove, and add features on the fly that allows us to cut down on our time to production and deliver a more user-friendly, enjoyable product.
- 🧑🏽💻 Engineering - The main part of it! While I’m just one engineer in an incredibly talented team, I still touch all parts of the codebase, backend, frontend, and even the infrastructure side. Our current project focuses on modernising a legacy system, rebuilding it from a C# .NET monolith into a fully serverless application. To do this we’re using AWS, NodeJS, and GraphQL for our backend, AWS RDS / S3 Buckets for our data storage. SST for Infrastructure and NextJS for the front end. All of which work in perfect harmony together (99% of the time).
- 💼 Business - Being part of a startup means that I also get to help with the business side, including writing blogs like this one! I’m involved in certain business meetings about the direction of the company, meeting new clients, and participate in discussions about future projects! All of this helps me to not only to develop my soft skills but also visualise the impact of the work that I’m doing - which in the software engineering world can sometimes be really hard to see!
My First Couple of months
Day one at BigByte began with meeting both Sam & Dom in our cool (and rather hip) office at DiSH Manchester. I got a VIP style tour in which I got to meet all the other prodigious companies and learn about what they do (my favourite being zally of course). Next up for me was to unbox my beautiful new M4 MacBook Pro and get my developer environment setup.
Over the next couple of days in office, I dove into the codebase, absorbing as much information as I could, asked an abundance of questions, and of course made the most of the free snacks 🍫.
By the end of week 2, I had gained some traction, understood small sections of the codebase for the logistics application and even completed my first ticket, which not long after was deployed into production! At this point I was starting to accumulate so much enthusiasm about my work, but as with any new role (and job title) the imposter syndrome was hitting hard.
Over the next coming weeks and months, I learned a huge amount by writing A LOT of code, addressing comments, reviewing PR’s, writing more code, and meeting with some great clients to better understand what features would deliver the most business impact. Outside of work, I began to study the codebase, read up on NextJS, SST and do a few AWS courses that were a pivotal point in deepening my understanding of the project’s tech stack.
😖 Impostor Syndrome
While I write this, I’ve been at BigByte Digital for almost five months now and I’m so pleased with myself that I took the opportunity to work here. Being here allows me to do incredibly challenging things that are super rewarding. I wanted to make this section to share some points I would tell my past self when starting this job and anyone else who may join us in the not-so-distant future.
- Don’t get discouraged because you can’t delve into the hard tickets straight away and understand every little bit about the code within the first month or so. You were hired for a reason, take time to embrace being a beginner again and learn as much as you can. My take on it is that if you’re frustrated and everything feels hard, good! It means you’re learning new skills that will make you a better engineer!
- Make sure to ask for help when you need it. Don’t be afraid to ask questions for clarity however many times you need to. Everyone at BigByte Digital is super friendly and will always make time to help guide you in the right direction. Asking these questions out loud will also often help others too.
- *The more you figure things out, the more you’ll realise you don’t know. ** When I first started working on the logistics application my brain had already simplified this down to “Oh cool this is just a CRUD application”, how wrong I was! There are so many intricate pieces that required knowledge that I didn’t have, and this can be super unsettling, especially if you came from a place where you were comfortable. But that’s okay just remember to look back every so often and realise how much you’ve learnt and achieved in such a short space of time. It’s a great mental boost that helps to chip away at the impostor syndrome!
- Adopt a growth mindset mentality. This is valuable not just in a work setting but for life too. Reframing challenges and setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow will give you more unfound motivation than you thought possible!
- Embrace challenges, if you see a difficult ticket that is outside of your comfort zone, do it! I’m not saying you should do this if it’s you’re first day, but once you’ve got to grips with some of the codebase, go for it! The challenges and struggles you’ll face will help you to grow way more than an easy 2-point ticket would.
- Find inspiration in others. Watching Dom & Sam work like a supercomputer was a huge inspiration for me. Seeing how resilient and dedicated they were motivated me to push myself and carry that same energy into my own work.
To keep it short and sweet, my journey so far at BigByte has been an epic one. Full of surprises, challenges, laughs, and plenty of sweet treats! Working in a startup environment with people I would call my friends has not only accelerated my growth as an engineer but also filled me excitement for what’s laid out for the journey ahead.