When I’m not working on personal projects or otherwise living life, I work full-time as a software engineer for a financial group. In short, I manage websites that make it easy to enroll in (and manage) investments for complicated retirement plans.

I was hired fresh out of college and placed on a team which was expected to bring new methods and technologies to our department. This involves moving past old Websphere servers with monthly deployments and towards daily deployments and a cloud-ready API driven mindset. Our business unit is also trying to build up a Product Mindset. These concepts have affected how I approach development on all projects, in and out of work.

Our apps mostly have Angular UIs, like my personal projects. Unlike my personal projects, they use Java Spring APIs and SQL databases, which makes sense for the work we do. I’m learning to appreciate Java in a way I hadn’t before. I still don’t love it enough to use it for any of my personal projects, something I should try eventually.

Working 40 hours per week on huge projects with stakeholders in different directions makes prioritizing and evaluating work a constant challenge. That challenge is teaching me how to better manage my own project priorities and how to make business cases for my ideas. I hope to eventually start using these skills to freelance!