I have a job: One year on

Throwback to the time when I found a job from a tweet:

Very lucky to have found this local startup. Small team, indie vibe, relaxed tone, fast and lean way of development. I do frontend development on a Rails monolith, so I work mostly in Ruby, Tailwind, in .html.erb files. Not a stack that I was deeply familiar with initially, but now I somewhat am. Still lots to learn, though. Sometimes I also do Webflow for their marketing site. Nocode is right up my alley. So far, I’m shipping features fast, making impact, being helpful. And that’s satisfying (and sometimes—guiltily—more satisfying than building my own indie products!). And all this while working from home, being close to my kid and family, having the flexibility and autonomy to work at my pace.

One year on, things are still going strong.

I’ve definitely settled into the role as a frontend dev. Gotten more familiar with the codebase. Got more than 200 PRs merged. Having an impact on the bottomline for sure. Holding a lot more context and experience now, feeling more useful.

I use Cursor and Claude every day to help me code in Rails, JavaScript, and it just works. From brainstorming architecture to implementation and to code reviews, it covers the whole pipeline with ease. It’s mindblowing how AI literally gave me this job.

I take pride in the features I build – sometimes during free time, I even visit the pages just to admire the work. That’s definitely a sign of pride and joy.

What’s awesome - it’s great working with the team. There’s trust. There’s a common understanding by now. Everyone’s professional and polite, patient and understanding. Couldn’t ask for a better team to work in and work for.

The best? This job played a big part in helping me get to a $10k per month ‘salary’, to feed my family. It saw us through survival stage, and now onwards to thriving stage. Couldn’t ask for more.

Grateful grateful grateful.