I take pride in the development work I do, whether it is for my job or if it’s something I’m working on personally. I believe in producing a high quality product as quickly as you can, but you shouldn’t sacrifice quality for speed. I accomplish this by taking pride in the work that I do.
Several months ago, I applied for a Lead Developer role at the company I work for now. When I sat down to have a chat with the hiring manager, he asked me how I would motivate a team to produce high quality work in a tight deadline, and I told him the same thing: I would tell them to take pride in the work they are doing. I’m not going to ask them to work long hours or take shortcuts, but I would inspire them to build something they’d be proud to call their own. When you take pride in something, you’re going to do everything you can to make it great. You’re going to get excited about working on it, and you’re going to make it high quality and work on it with a lot of motivation, which means you’ll get it done quicker than if you didn’t have pride in what you’re working on.
Recently I built an administration portal with a little piece of functionality for our primary product. I had identified a big source of a lot of the support tickets that we received that required us to have one of our other teams interrupt their work to fix it constantly. This is something that could’ve been solved by having a website that a user could go to to fix the issue themselves instead of having to involve 4-5 different teams and wait up to a couple of days at times to get it fixed. During my extra time at work, I build this site to allow our support team members to fix this issue themselves. In one week after it being released, the ticket count that got sent to the team that had to fix these issues went from a weekly average of 65 tickets down to 15. That’s definitely something that I’m proud of.
There’s a ton of accomplishments I could list out here that I”m proud of in terms of development, but that would make for too long of a read. What are you most proud of in your life?