My Experience As A Junior Software Engineer at Tietoevry, Pune 👨‍💼
My past 1 year experience
So I started my professional journey right out of college at Tietoevry on 2nd August 2021 as a Junior Software Engineer.
Tietoevry is a Finnish IT software and service company providing IT and product engineering services. It provides solution in many different sectors or domains. I was part of their Financial Services Solutions (FSS) business — presently known as Tietoevry Banking.
The Beginning
The first 2 months of joining consisted of completing the on-boarding procedures, starting with Training in Java and Angular, Soft Skills and some Technical training workshops.
After getting trained for about 2 months, we were assigned to different teams within Tietoevry Banking, working on VAM (Virtual Account Management) product of Tietoevry.
Within A Team
I was initially assigned to a team as a DevOps engineer but I talked with my then manager and he was kind enough to change my profile to a Developer role immediately. The very next day I started out in my new Team as a Software Developer.
The on-boarding was smooth and initial few weeks were all about completing the KT (Knowledge Transfer) videos about the product and getting to know the code base well. We all were assigned buddies to whom we could ask any of our doubts.
After completing a month in November, me and a fellow Fresher were told to give a small session consisting of a walk-through on the product and our understanding of the code base.
Starting Work
After our session, we started getting assigned a few functional defects and started our work on them. Initially it seemed tough but team members were of great help and helped us out when we felt stuck. In meantime me and my friend would teach each other things we were learning along the way.
About 20 days later, we were paired up with a fellow colleague and started work on API testing using Karate. Initial KTs (Knowledge Transfers) were given to us and we both started our work with him. So December end and starting January went into learning and completing API tests for the different REST API services.
Getting Better
Along the way we kept learning how to navigate through the code base, how to debug, test our code, write unit & integration tests and how to deploy our code on servers for functionality testing.
By February most of the work related to API testing was over and my friend got assigned UI related work while I worked on the Back-end. For about 2 weeks I also tried my hands at Testing by doing API and UI functionality testing, this although not a developer’s job is essential to understanding how and why some bugs creep into the product. A simple missing flag, error message or 1 line of code can break a functionality. So a tester’s job is really difficult. It was overall a good experience as the testing team was really fun to work with.
Learning UI
By March, I was starting to get familiar with Back-end and how different services were constructed. For 2 weeks I was paired again with previously mentioned colleague to complete Contract Tests for all the new services for the component. We were able to complete all of them and run it all in the build pipeline.
In April I was asked to start taking UI related work for the team. One senior was assigned to me for guiding me along the way. The installation was quite a bit of trouble as I realized not everything worked out of the box, but I was able to get the all the installations done in the end.
2–3 defects were assigned to me at the start and I started learning more about the UI code-base and how to debug Angular applications while running it on localhost. Since the entire codebase was in Angular, it was fun to get familiar with JavaScript and TypeScript again.
Starting work on Stories
Ending April and starting May, one Story (Task) was assigned to me related to UI development work for the product. Implementing the story was quite a challenge initially as I never worked with Angular before but with some help I was able to complete the task. I learned things like debugging, writing unit tests and how different components interact with each other in Angular. Along the way I also learned how to fix build & sonar issues in the raised PRs and how to ask good questions.
Learning to Integrate
In June, I started work on BFF or the integration layer of VAM. It is the place where we integrate our Backend services to create aggregate services which can be used by our VAM-UI application.
The story (read: task) I was assigned involved one of the core services in VAM which found its use in 4–5 other services in BFF code base. This made the task a bit tricky at first and I had no idea about what I was doing. But team members were empathetic and helpful as always. Along the way I learned how to write an Integration service in Java, writing API and contract tests for BFF module, debugging BFF code-base and testing changes through UI and Postman to check if the service was working accordingly or not.
It is the story I’m most proud of till date :)
Learning to be a team-player
The above is not entirely an exhaustive list of things that I did but it certainly included some key things that I was able to accomplish during my 1st Year.
Software Development requires you to work in teams and this can be sometimes daunting or even difficult for some people initially. Trust me it is weird to call someone and tell him/her about the problem you are facing and not know why certain things don’t work — In such scenarios it is always better to take someone else’s opinion on the problem.
Most times we think in one specific direction and may forget to check a few other things. By asking someone’s opinion you open your mind to their way of thinking. And by doing this you both grow.
Conclusion
If you read through all this, I really appreciate you. To be honest, It has been a good experience. Things were not always easy and it certainly took some time to learn but I’m glad it worked out in the end.
Most importantly I’m thankful to all my colleagues who helped me out through out the past year because it has really been a journey.
Until next time, Cheers!
