Long day today. The one thing that I’ve noticed since working on a team is the mindset that you have to switch from. Going from building things by yourself, to waiting on your design and product team to get final approval on certain things. Things don’t just start. It’s a process for them to start. Currently, we’re working on an NFT project for a client and it seems like there is so much going wrong with the project. I think there was a lot of misguidance and misdirection (or lack thereof) from those in charge of the project. Basically, what our product team is having to do is go back and clean up the mess that has been made. This in turn is causing a tight time crunch on deliverables, which ultimately is going to fall back on the devs (there’s currently only myself and my manager on the Web3 side). Kind of stressful but, hey, the ultimate battle test is coming up.

Overall it was a normal day. Typical daily standup, my manager wasn’t able to make it due to illness. He did in fact show up a bit later. I applaud him for pushing through, even through sickness. We ended up having a mid-day standup, which I actually missed because I thought he (my manager) set the time for 3:15 pm CST. He’s on East coast time, so you could imagine the confusion there. I was extremely late (like almost an hour) when I noticed that the meeting was 3:15 EST but I hopped in anyway. We briefly chatted about the current NFT project that we are working on.

What’s mindblowing to me is how less it feels like I have to do on a daily basis. Programming is really a “sprint. eat. rest.” skill (Hopefully I’m not butchering that). Working for an agency, most of the downtime comes when I’m waiting on approvals from clients and the product teams. So, when there is no approval, I’m pretty much sitting around (😂). This is fine by me, but I definitely need to find ways to occupy my time. Ultimately, this benefits me because it gives me time to give my 11-month-old more attention. We currently don’t have child care (it’s either too expensive or everyone is already booked out) so since she was born, I’ve been at home with her. My wife and I both work from home, but I have more flexibility in terms of my work schedule. This is the cool thing about becoming an engineer and slightly the part that I was looking forward to haha.

The code that I did have to write today was horrible. Why is CSS so hard? What was challenging me was that some margin would separate the image and text that I was using and make the image smaller which in turn made the UI not look anything like the Figma design. I found sort of a hack to it by setting the margin to a certain amount on the overall wrapper and then setting more margin to the text. I don’t believe this is going to pass a code review but I pushed it up anyway 🤷🏾‍♂️. I’m sure my manager will have many comments that will show me a much better way to do the desired result. That’s the suck part about being so junior, you don’t know the absolute best ways to solve a problem…until you run into code reviews from someone more senior than you…like my manager. That’s why I take such an approach of, “I’m here to learn”, every day on my job.

I’m probably going to end the day by seeing if I can refine the code that I pushed up. I want to exhaust every option before I call it a night. I really am determined to be a great engineer. That means a lot to me.

God bless

- Orlundo