For half a year on the team, I worked on maintaining, enhancing, and testing the system with the rest of the team. The effort was not routed to just frontend or backend development, but my effort was distributed to all corners of the system (frontend to backend). After the half-year mark, management needed an engineer to take over the development of a system that the senior engineer was working on. Out of the five new hires, I was chosen to lead in the development, enhancement, maintenance, and overall system growth of the system. In parallel, work on a new international system was starting, and I was placed on a team to help with the design and architecture of the backend for the new system. This meant researching which frameworks to implement, drawing and designing how internal web services will talk with the new system, implementing the latest and greatest security protocols, and helping the Software Architect get the new system from design to production.
For the first few weeks, my tasks were quite usual for a software engineer. My first few tasks were to update our existing API software to consume new data endpoints coming from new IoT devices. Afterward, all new tasks comprised responsibilities that further increased my experience and value as a Software Engineer. From server maintenance to refactoring legacy code to improve performance for our clients, at TRAX, the endless mirage of tasks keeps testing my knowledge and task execution as a software engineer, which always keeps me at my best; never is a dull day here at TRAX.
At TRAX, we use much remote communication as we have partners located outside Georgia and even the United States. I find it amazing that our development team can push out enhancements around the clock for our clients, which pushes our competitive advantage as a company. The premise of having a client know that we at TRAX are capable of resolving any software issue outside of regular business hours should be reassuring to our clients.
If I were to point out just one benefit, out of the many benefits, of working for TRAX, it out by having the freedom to research and develop new enhancements that will help our application be more competitive than our competitors. The latest enhancement that is planned to be rolled out is an Artificial Intelligence system designed to be integrated with our Smart Restroom solution. The Artificial Intelligence system will help custodians and management to allocate their resources better. At a high level, the Artificial Intelligence system forecasts(predicts) future restroom trends about the daily, weekly, and seasonal trends.
For any up-and-coming engineers, I would give them this one piece of advice. Accept all the challenges that come your way. Even if you fail, learn from them, and take the lessons learned for all of your future tasks. Succeeding in these challenges will help you grow in your career and professional experience, crucial for growth. Other than that, make sure to have good posture when working. As most developers use laptops, looking down on laptops can make you hunch over and promote lousy posture. Keep posture in the back of your head; not correcting posture will cause pain down the road. Better to fix them now than when you get old.
