Growth Necessities

The hardest part about working at home is the lines of communication, although I would say those issues persist in the office, as well. I communicate constantly with my fellow JavaScript developer, but everyone else in the company has pretty much faded into the background. Again, though, even when we were in the office, I didn't communicate much with these other people, anyways. There are a couple members on the team I need feedback from, and when I need it, I tend to be able to get it. Otherwise, besides someone checking in from time to time, I'm left pretty much on my own. On the other hand, my cohort and I work on some of the same projects quite often, including the virtual appointment setter. While I started this project off and got pretty much everything fully functional, there was a point where we were both working on separate branches of it, him on the styling and me on the functionality. Last Friday, we merged both these branches into the master and I handed the project off to him. Since I had the functionality ready to go, I thought it would take him maybe a day to set up the styling and another day at the max to get the backend up and running. Coming into Thursday, he's almost finished with it, but still putting the finishing touches on it. As I said yesterday, we work at different paces. He's a little more meticulous than I am, and I tend to be able to push out a lot of work in a little bit of time, though it may still need some polishing. This has worked well for us, so far.

Since I handed the project off to him, I've been working on creating a way for customers to pay for their plans with a bank account instead of a credit card. I don't know enough about how the backend works yet, so I can't hook it up all the way, but I'm almost done with the frontend. The hardest part was getting the check to look right. The executives wanted a form that took in the routing and account numbers in inputs and displayed it on a mock check, similar to how they handle credit cards right now. The big difference here is that the credit card part is a third-party library that comes out of the box looking awesome; I had to make the check from scratch. I started off trying to build it just with some implementations of flex box and styling from there, but I quickly got to the point where it was unmanageable. Then, I realized this would be a perfect opportunity to implement a grid. So, I gave it a try, but about an hour or 2 into it realized I didn't remember much about creating grids. So, I did some research, scrapped my work for a second time, and started all over. This time, it worked, and it looked pretty awesome. There were some margin issues here and there and spacing changes, but I got it all figured out. We had a meeting yesterday about the virtual appointment app, and I decided to bring up what I had been doing.

This gave me the opportunity to show off my work. In this meeting, it was my other JavaScript developer, someone who kind of supervises us, and the CTO. I guess they were impressed, because in the main meeting today, they asked me to lead it off with what I had been working on. This is the meeting we have every week with the CEO, other executives, and the rest of the IT department. They had some critiques and things to add, but for the most part, people were pretty happy with what they saw, and excited to get it implemented. Since the meeting yesterday, I found an API that allowed me to take the routing number and match it to the correct bank, so I got the bank name to display next to an icon of an important looking building and put it right above the line where you sign your name on the check, coming in dynamically. I think, overall, people were pretty impressed with what I had come up with, and it gave me a lot of confidence going forward. I'm finally starting to feel a bit more comfortable and competent in my role, and I feel like I'm really adding value to the team, as well. I was also able to implement some more tricks I had learned from my CSS course, including a keyframes animation that triggered every time a page was loaded, fading in the content of the page from the left. I don't know if anyone liked it, or even if I like it yet, but I think it at least adds some life to the page. I'm getting into the meat of the CSS course I'm taking now, so hopefully I can pick up some other tricks to use along the way to impress the team.

Until tomorrow!