Square 1

I worked for Square1 as Full-stack Developer for one year and eight months. The job was always challenging, since we had many projects of different kinds, and deadlines were often haunting us!

The main framework I used was Laravel (PHP), which I learnt and started to love. Most of the projects we developed for were public websites or small enterprise apps, and Laravel did a great job for those. We didn’t do anything fancy for the Frontend, just some good old jQuery here and there. It made sense though, since SSR was not as sophisticated as it is nowadays, so integrating any modern Framework like Vue or React would have meant deadly loading time penalisations and horrendous SEO results (time is gold in public websites’ business).

This was my first experience working in a big team with real-world constraints and day-to-day habits. In general, I learnt a lot during my time in this company, and I keep only good memories :)

• I created my first professional pull requests (and I received my first hundreds of this is wrong).
• I learnt how to plan for long-term projects, where a certain customer has some expectations.
• I started to be more aware of the importance of a good product quality (real customers have real complains!).
• I had to improve my communication and soft skills, it was not just me anymore, and these things started to matter.
• After almost 2 years in a 100% business environment, I improved my skills as developer a lot, especially since I was surrounded by great devs (and better people).

At some point I decided that I had to go though, and the main reason is that working for a company of this kind involves a lot of context switching, since you are responsible for a lot of projects (that are often very different one from the other). That’s why I started looking for other opportunities, especially interested on positions in companies that owned a development product.