My Journey to become a front end engineer 🌉

My first job

I started working at a company called Telus International in El Salvador, I was able to contribute to at least 50 web applications from small to larger ones. For me, it was basically the school before school, you know? I was a Software Engineer developing web applications using PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Back in the day we would not need to use compilers for our JavaScript or CSS, we actually was using a lot of jQuery, and Symfony (a PHP framework).

At the time, I did not know I would have been attracted to create websites and work in the web. When I was studying to be a Software Engineer, the path was not clear to me, but thank to that first job, I realized I liked to handle data and paint it in the screen and make it look nice.

The very first thing I remember doing to make a web application look better was to use select2 to make dropdowns have way much better user experience, it was a great success and ever since all of the apps we were working on started to use the same plugin.

Also, I was one of the devs interested on using Bootstrap and implement it on our common libraries to use. I experimented with colors and how I wanted our web apps to look like and I successfully push these kind of small but noticeable changes within the team I work with.

All of this made me realize that I like to work on the parts of the web app that was user facing, back in the day there was no such thing as "I work in the Front End or I work in the Back End"; it was always the same project folder and everything was in it. Which had its pros and cons, of course.