This job not only helped me mentally but also emotionally and physically.

I reached a major personal milestone in my career this month, my one year work anniversary as a PHP developer.

Let me start by giving a quick introduction. My name is Jaco Roux I am from South Africa and I live in a town called Lichtenburg. I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to work as a PHP developer late last year at one of the big agriculture companies in South Africa. Needless to say as soon as I saw the job posting I jumped on it like a spider monkey. Weeks later a lot changed in my life.

I lost my mother to leukemia and I was in a very bad place. Not wanting to go on, working the same job for the last seven years with no future prospects, feeling like my studies are not progressing and a overall demotivated feeling from dusk till dawn. By this time I was sure that my application was unsuccessful because it was long past the deadline for applications.

A few weeks passed and I got the call for the interview. I was a bit stressed because I had zero real world experience and only knew what I have learned from my studies up to that point which was HTML and JavaScript. I was confident that I would be able to learn PHP fast because I have a good understanding of basic programming principles.

The interview started with a few personal questions and then a few programming questions followed by a small written test with HTML, JavaScript and PHP questions. I felt that I did good in the test and the overall interview went much better than I expected.

The Journey Begins

After a few weeks I got the long awaited phone call and I accepted the job offer with a lot of enthusiasm. I started my first day and it was overwhelming meeting all the people and the team that I would be working on, all these talented programmers and academics and already I had a bad case of impostor syndrome.

Am I really good enough to be part of this team? Will I still have a job after the first month? Will I be able to perform the tasks given to me? All these questions and no answers. Luckily I was part of a new team that started together on a three year long project to work on a ERP system for the company, reworking all their legacy systems to a new fresh web based system. We finished a week long training program and was given our first projects.

Everyday is a new challenge and that is what I love about this job.

I started my project and with each passing day learned more and more and more and new technologies kept on being added to my arsenal. This was all a year ago and today I can proudly say I no longer have that dreaded impostor syndrome. I have learned so much over the past year it is simply mind-boggling. I keep on learning new stuff every day thanks to the talented people I work with and the diverse systems I work on from stuff like systems for the liquid fertilizer department to HR-systems for job descriptions and performance reviews to cash receipts. Everyday is a new challenge and that is what I love about this job.

Reaching for the Stars

My studies are progressing at a good pace thanks to my work and my experience with the technologies I use at work helps me tremendously. When I first started I only knew a bit of HTML and JavaScript now I use PHP, HTML, JavaScript, JQuery, mySQL and JSON daily. I have also learned to think in a practical, logical way about each problem and my interpersonal skills improved a lot. I am now a lot easier to get along with than I was a few years back thanks to great colleagues and managers.

I had the opportunity to give training to the end users on a system I worked on thanks to my mentor who is also my direct manager. At first I panicked because I have never done a presentation in front of a lot of people but he gave me a few pointers and took me for a trial run and worked out all the quirks. I had two weeks of two sessions a day with ten to sixteen people per session in a boardroom environment with me standing in front and presenting answering questions etc. This experience helped me overcome my fear of public speaking and opened up a whole new world to me.

After this first year I can safely say that I made the right choice to leave my old job. I now tackle each and every task head-on and after each project I can see how much I improved. This job not only helped me mentally but also emotionally and physically.

My message to anyone that is considering a job in software development is just do it. If you can go home each day and you know that you can be proud of the work you have done for the day, then you will know true happiness.