Posted by Pedro Sanchez on Nov 21, 2016

Pedro: My first five months at MyBuilder

My adventure in London started around a year ago. I arrived at the end of July 2015, after working as a software developer for a company located in Gliwice (Poland), for 1 year and a half. My wife and I decided that it was the time to make a very important step in our lives. I applied to companies in Germany and the UK, and finally I got a job at MediaMath, in London, where I spent 8 months working with a very good and talented group of people.

Unfortunately, one day the company decided to make some adjustments and most of the people of my team, including me, could not keep our jobs. It was a very sad and difficult moment in my career.

The $contact[0] with MyBuilder

After the disaster, I started applying on several companies in London and one day, the MyBuilder CTO (Gavin) called me and told me to come to the office to have the first interview.

After a very nice and interesting chat, he told me to accomplish a code test which, to be honest, was the most entertaining code test I ever made, specially because most of the companies rely on this Hacker Rank (ish) kind of tests which I personally find… boring.

On the second interview I met Ryan, the CEO, and Sten, the lead developer. On that interview we discussed together my code test and I had the opportunity to give my arguments and explain the decisions I made on the code test. I felt like I was already working here… somehow ;).

The new Stuff;

After working for four months here in MyBuilder, I have to say that I learnt more new things than ever. This is something I really like especially, because I have enough time to do my job and research about other things I really wanted to learn. In my case, one of the things I had the opportunity of start learning is Haskell, just for having an idea of how a pure functional programming language works and how this can be used to change the way you face problems in general (thanks to Sten for that ;).

Other areas which I am way better than before is specially SQL, and PostgreSQL, which I never used before. I have to say that after trying PostgreSQL, it will be difficult for me to come back to MySQL. There are so many features that MySQL lacks, like JSON data types, or polygon data types. Databases always was a pending thing for me to learn, and here finally I had the time to learn it in detail.

I am mainly a back-end developer, but on my first days I was a pure graphic designer, and my first experience with web pages was with HTML and CSS (and IE6… ┻━┻ ︵ヽ(`Д´)ノ︵ ┻━┻). Here I could spend some time doing some front-end stuff, which I particularly enjoy, and also improve my null skills on Javascript. I really hated Javascript, seriously, I hated so much… but I just realised that it was because I didn’t know how to use it properly. I just started to like it more and more. With all those new features on ECMAScript 6, tools such Gulp, Babel… and libraries such React, I really find the front-end development much more attractive, making Javascript less scary to me. All of this also helped me to revive some old memories of my designer days.

I really like the way the work is managed here, and it’s the first place I’ve worked where everyone prefers something done well instead of quick and mediocre, and this is something REALLY hard to find somewhere else.

For me, it is really challenging and very hard sometimes working with this group of talented people, but they are the kind of people who pull me with them and care about me so I never feel left behind.

The $ENV{“MyBuilder”}

The office is really cool. We have foosball table, and a lot of music instruments (yes, we have a drum set as well \w/òÓ.\w/). We have coffee machine, free food, and plenty of tech books of any kind (and if you cannot find one, just ask for it!).

Conclusion no, I don’t have a geek joke for this one

It is refreshing to work at a place where everyone cares genuinely about quality. All I can say is that I feel extremely lucky to work here.

<? Peace and love for everyone, and happy coding!

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