I made the hard decision to leave reinteractive recently. It wasn’t easy for many reasons but at the end I decided to take on a new challenge. I don’t want to go without writing something about my time at reinteractive which has been really great.
During the last 18 months I have had a blast working with this team, reInteractive is a fantastic company with a lot of respect and care for their developers.
This time has help me a lot to lift my game as a developer, this has been a combination of many things.
Multiple Challenges
Working at reinteractive I have been involved in many different and challenging projects, from pure backend data processing systems to mostly front-end single page applications. This of course has been an excellent way to learn and broaden my skills.
Professional Development
reinteractive has a policy of 20% time for professional development. Having this time has been amazing for learning and experimenting with new things, even if I didn’t get to use all of them I learnt many things that I applied to the projects.
I had plenty of opportunities and encouragement to mentor other people, I also had the lots of support and time to write quality blog posts about topics related to web development. I consider these things an excellent way to make myself a better developer.
Finally we had excellent discussions going on all the time with other senior developers and plenty of help when dealing with an unfamiliar problem.
Clients
I have had fantastic clients and the not so great ones, but reinteractive has always dealt with their expectations effectively. I know from experience how easily things can go wrong when expectations are mismanaged. This has provided me with a great environment that facilitated productivity and great quality deliverables.
Dealing with many different clients has definitely help me a lot to improve my client liaison and communication skills.
Lessons
I have learn many valuable lessons about software maintainability and working in teams. Working in projects where people come and go often, has taught me much about:
- writing clean code,
- writing clear self documenting tests,
- choosing solid and maintainable things,
- giving constructive feedback,
- being a clear communicator,
- effective team workflows,
- and many other things.
Remote
This is a huge one, in reinteractive 100% of the work is done remote. For me it meant a lot of flexibility during my day. Going for a swim at lunch time, why not? Not having to commute is a great time saver, it is very hard to put a value on this time, but it is quite big. Definitely will do remote work again, this is the future.
Finally I have to mention that I made many great friends here, thanks reinteractive for this time!
Editor: And thank you Sebastian for your wonderful work and dedication to producing super high quality code for our clients, you will be missed, and good luck with your future!
