Like hundreds of other 🖖 Spicedlings, Parinaz took the leap from Project Management to Full Stack Web Developer. She’s now working at global tech giant eBay, where she gets to work on her own cool projects, travel to conferences, and build things that people actually use. We spoke with her about her burgeoning career, and about what keeps her motivated as a Developer.
Why did you choose to study at Spiced? What made the course stand out?
I wanted to learn JavaScript and Spiced offered a Full Stack Web Development program with a curriculum that sounded great. I liked the projects from former Spiced students that were presented on the website and after meeting the admissions team and talking to them I felt motivated and decided that this would be the right academy for me.
You graduated 2 years ago, what have you been up to since?
After my graduation, I joined eBay in Dreilinden where I got exposure to new programming languages (TypeScript, Java, Scala), learned about additional development aspects (e.g. testing, app and system architecture, data types, …) and participated in different employer branding activities. Furthermore, I attended many exciting conferences and worked on my own little projects..
You’re now working for eBay. Can you tell us a bit about your role there?
At eBay, I work as a software engineer with a primary focus on frontend aspects. In addition to that, I’m learning Scala and Java to become more full stack. My role here does not only consist of developing new features for our product eBay Plus but it also includes managing and organising our projects as a tech or epic lead.For instance talking to stakeholders like the business unit or Marketing to develop internal tools for them to use and make their everyday work life easier is also part of my job. For this my previous work experience is very useful.
Can you take us through a recent professional project?
Currently I am working on an internal tool for our colleagues from the Business Unit. It focusses on the monitoring and configuration of marketing campaigns. For this tool, we set up a TypeScript backend, a so-called experience service and a React frontend. We get the necessary campaign data from our Data Warehouse and visualise everything through tables and graphs. To speed up the data retrieval, the results of the rather expensive SQL queries against the Data Warehouse are stored in temporary (VDM; Virtual Data Mart) tables and get auto-updated several times per day.
Initially, why did you want to make the move into web development?
I have been working in consulting and also as a project manager for many years, also with developers on digital projects. I always liked what they did and found it more it interesting than what I did especially as you get to see the results of your work instantly when you are coding. I started looking into online courses on HTML, Ruby and JavaScript and loved it.
What inspires you to keep learning and coding?
Coding is fun and I’d like to become better, faster and more efficient at it. More knowledge also leads to more possible solutions and ways of developing something as you can use different frameworks, libraries or even languages that suit your needs better. Also I want to be able to build better and more useful things in the future, things that might be helpful for people or contribute to open source projects.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting at a coding bootcamp, what would it be?
Don’t give up even if it is hard and you feel like you don’t get it. It will finally click. Sometimes it just needs time.
What was your biggest challenge during the course?
Keeping up with the pace. It took me quite a bit to understand the things that were taught and sometimes we were learning something new already while I was still trying to understand the previous lesson.
Can you tell about your favourite projects?
My favourite project was definitely the social network project which we did with React. I like React and it was so cool learning all these things like real time chatting and building your own online social media platform. And my second favourite project was of course my final project, the späti finder 🙂
What do you love about being a developer?
You create things that people actually use. You see the results of your work right away and get instant gratification. There is a big community online that you can ask for help when facing a problem.
