Digging Deeper: Working as a Software Developer

Tell me straight, what does a typical day of a Bornfight Software Dev look like?

Well, there are really no typical days. You see, as Bornfight is one of the top software development companies, we work on a variety of different projects, so every day is a little bit different. I usually start it with a group coffee where we talk about some new tech we saw, latest news, some situations or challenges we stumbled upon on our projects and the like.

After that, I go back to my workplace and check out the things I need to do – emails, tasks, latest updates, the status of the projects I work on as well as other projects. That’s a great thing here – you can see what other developers are working on so you’re always in the loop. When I get that initial setup done, I start working on tasks that are defined for a specific day (we define them together with project managers).

Around noon, I usually go out to lunch, and when I get back I feel a bit sleepy so I go and take a n… Kidding, I don’t take a nap, I go and play a couple of rounds of ping-pong. I know a ping-pong table has now become a staple of every company, but it’s really awesome. A few minutes of it after lunch really boosts your energy levels and wakes you up.

The second part of the day really depends on the projects I work on. I usually continue working on my daily tasks, but there are also project meetings I attend, as well as educations. For example, Dev Weekly where we talk about different things we can improve in the team, new ideas, some challenges we faced, creating specific tools or documentations that’ll make solving those challenges easier and more efficient. All in all, a bunch of different topics.

And that’s more or less it. As I said, the official work day all depends on the project. What comes after is a bit more typical. We stay in the office, attend meetups that are organized in the company, have a few drinks… We hang out quite a lot together!

You talk a lot about educations, and it looks like Dev team is very focused on them.

Oh yeah, educations are a crucial part of our work in Bornfight. The topics we cover are really different, anyone can suggest a topic they would like to know more about or share knowledge on something they already know. We have our team educations that are all about development, but we also listen to educations from other teams about their lines of work. It’s great to know how other teams work because all teams are connected on the projects. Project managers, testers, mobile developers, designers, front-end devs and we back-end devs, we all work together so these kinds of educations make our collaboration really easy.

As the educations are open for all of us and anyone may ask anything, I really like those situations when somebody asks a question that no one knows the answer to. That’s not something bad, quite the opposite. That’s when our curious mentality really kicks in and we all try to figure it out. So yeah, to keep it short, Dev team is very focused on educations!

Tell me more about the projects our Software Development team works on.

Let’s see how to put this. I’d say there are two main categories – projects for clients and internal projects. Our internal projects are usually different tools and products we use to make our work more efficient or easier. For example we work on complex tools for our company finances, but we also work on simpler tools like our application for ordering food.

When it comes to projects for clients, they are the largest part of our work and they are extremely different – from smaller projects that last a couple of months to long-term projects that have been active for years, from smaller presentational websites and interactive games that use motion tracking or different trending technologies, all the way to giant systems and software that are back-end heavy, both in terms of technologies used as well as people involved. And that’s one of the biggest benefits of Bornfight, you can work on a variety of different projects and you’re never working alone. If you get stuck on anything, there are people that can help you out. We will all jump in and try to solve the problem.

In addition to that, on a majority of the projects you’ll work together with project managers, designers, front-end developers… And you all carry the project together.
Like I said, every project is different and every project uses different technologies (yeah, we mostly use PHP, JS, TypeScript and Node.js, but we also use so much more) so you can really find your development path.

Now that you mentioned technologies, tell me are devs in the team specialized or do you all want to master everything?

Well, every developer in the team has its own preferred technology they want to master, but we’re not specialized. I mean, it’s not that we’re all language-agnostics and know all programming languages, but we use a wide variety of technologies and it’s our goal to share the knowledge on as many of them as we can.

The thing is, we all have that can-do mindset, everything can be learned, solved and done. Yeah, we have a list of technologies we use the most, but it’s not a definite list. We’re always checking out new things, new languages, new frameworks and new tools. Knowing a lot of different things is certainly beneficial because we work on different projects and encounter different challenges.

This can-do mindset is interesting. Tell me more about the thing that drives the Software Development team.

The first thing that comes to mind is curiosity and loving your work. I know it may sound generic and cheesy, but people here love creating things, discovering how things really work and constantly improving themselves. We always push ourselves to create something new, something that was never done, something people might even be scared to do. That’s the philosophy of the entire Software Development team.

You see, we’re all ready to tackle even the ugliest of challenges, and you know we’ll do everything to solve them. We’ll dig and dig and dig until we find that right solution. And that’s easy here because, as I already said, you’re never working alone. There are a ton of people who’re always ready to help you solve any problem, because they see it as a challenging and and a way to improve their skills.

And when the problem is solved, we go to our Quality Assurance team that makes sure everything is bulletproof and polished to perfection.

So, everything goes through a couple of rounds of quality assurance?

For sure, everyone on the team loves that part of the project. We even have our own Facebook group where we post our latest projects, and then we all jump on and try to break them using anything at our disposal. This process enables us to locate and fix all possible errors before the finished solution is officially launched.

As I said, it’s that mindset we have. We’re all amped up about tech, we’re curious, we’re ready to help out each other and we always want to improve. Look, we’re working in a field that changes every day and we all want to be on top of everything, so we’re always pushing each other to reach that next level.

Let’s get back to the beginning. Tell me about onboarding and mentorship in the Software Development team.

You start with the onboarding process the first day you get here. You also get a mentor who introduces you to the company itself, as well as the team. During those first couple of days, you get to know all the people, you have meetings with team leaders from different departments and also project managers – the goal is to show you the basics of the company and how different teams within it function. After this initial period, you and your mentor go through all of the things you’ll be doing, from the equipment to your first project and everything in between. The great thing here is that this mentorship phase doesn’t end – your mentor follows your progress for as long as you’re here. And what’s even better is that you have the freedom to try out different things and experiment.

You see, Bornfight is all about having the right mindset. We are all here treated equally, it doesn’t matter if we’re interns, juniors, middles or seniors – every opinion counts and everyone can help the team grow. You can see that thing when we work on projects – when you write something, you can ask anyone to review your code and look at it from a different perspective, a different angle. And the best thing is that all projects are challenging, so we can all get together and try to solve problems we encounter. That’s where our strength in numbers really shines and why everything functions so smoothly both within our team and in cooperation with others.

Now that you talked a bit about different positions within the team, let’s focus a bit more on interns. Why is joining Bornfight good for students?

I’ll tell you straight up. Students in Bornfight don’t just watch some tutorials, work on tiny scripts or do some basic things. We want them to learn and experience what working on real projects is all about, so they go through all development phases on a certain project. From the initial setup, through coding and testing, all the way to the final deployment. They are also involved in all processes and meetings, as well as decision making. A student may come here without some real work experience, but give it a couple of projects, and they’ll get real-world experience in no time.

Also, the company really invests a lot in teaching and developing students, so it isn’t really a surprise that everyone decides to stay and get full-time employment positions after they graduate.

And the last one. What would you say to people who’re thinking about joining Bornfight’s Software Development team?

Don’t just think about it, go and apply. Once you get here, we all will show you the ropes, help you out and teach you. Bornfight is great because you can develop yourself in any way you want, and if you’re ever like… oh this is not for me, I don’t use that technology or you have any doubts, just know that having the right mindset is what counts. Everything else can be learned. And there’s a whole bunch of us at Bornfight you can learn from!

That’s all for this edition of Digging Deeper.