A workplace experience (Mike) : A place to jumpstart your IT career!

We would like to introduce Mike's work experience here at World Wide Wings Co., Ltd.

as a full-stack developer and an English teacher!

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Hello readers,

Thanks for reading my story on Wantedly, I’m Mike and I am a full stack

developer that has been working at World Wide Wings Co., Ltd. (Wings) for

about a year both as a developer and a teacher.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably curious as to what kind of workplace

Wings is.

Back when I first started I was an eager beaver, nervous, and ready to prove my

worth in a real work environment. Having never formally studied computer

science in University, I was quite nervous being a self taught developer with a

small dose of imposter syndrome.

First and foremost, let’s talk about the work environment in terms of IT.

Wings has a very friendly work place environment and understanding

coworkers for people with little to no work experience. We use English as

everyone is quite fluent and we use a very popular tech stack (React for the

frontend and NodeJs for the backend). I was given very small tasks in the

beginning, and slowly worked my way up to bigger and bigger features, bug

fixes and refactors.

Of course it was not all smooth sailing though, I’ve made many mistakes, I’ve

been stuck for long periods on code and struggled with testing. Yet the senior

developer has always been friendly and helped with anything needed. The key

for me was to absorb the knowledge of how or why something didn’t work, and

what the solution was.

There is also a variety of areas to work on. Interested in design and UI? You can

request more work on the frontend. Interested in data handling and logic? You

can request more backend work!

For mid level developers and up, Wings is a place to truly be creative and have

more control/say over the code, process and design. Opinions are always taken

into account for matters such as a way of implementing a feature, new

technologies or general expertise in an area. You could also have the chance to

mentor junior developers if that is what you are interested in!

In terms of teaching, it’s also very fun as it’s a nice balance between intense

sessions of coding and then being able to hang out and have fun with students.

We do a lot of things like doing fun activities and watching Disney movies!

One thing that always amazes me is how fast children pick up a new language.

We have a lot of children who come almost 5 days a week, a few of them having

never experienced English prior to coming to Wings. It truly is amazing and

satisfying to see that within just a few months, they slowly become able to form

sentences and develop a bank of English vocabulary.

For older kids, it may be more challenging for them to adjust to an English only

environment, so it is challenging yet rewarding to have to adjust how to teach

and how you speak to students to be able to help them grow.

Next, let’s talk about what a normal day looks like for me.

I am usually the first time arrive in the office in the morning, I sit at an empty

desk, and I’ll usually recall what I was working on the day before or if the senior

developer has messaged me any tasks over Slack, I’ll also check Github and

see if there are any pull requests that need to be refactored.

I’ll work until a bit after midday and then have lunch.

After lunch I’ll head into the classroom. Usually I’ll have a pickup so I’ll go to a

specific school to pick up our student(s) and bring them back to Wings. After

that we’ll have snack time, class time, and activity time. After this, I’ll clock out

and call it a day.

Overall, Wings is a great place to work if you know some coding and want to

start a career in IT. You also get to teach English to children of all ages which is

really fun so you are able to mix up what you do everyday if you enjoy some

variety.

Thanks for reading!

Mike

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