Working for Big Enterprises made me start Side Projects
Intro
I started my front end web development career in a large company (1000+) after a couple of years of learning how to program for the web at home, around 6 years ago.
I spent 2 years with that company and, since it was my first job and had a great team, I learned most of what I know and what I'm valued for today.
When I decided it was time to move on I went to 9 different interviews that year.
This may not sound like a lot but at the time I was relocating so this meant looking for companies around 300km from where I was originally and in some cases the interviews were not remote (which was very consuming for me).
I always had passion for what I do and for the consumer experience and thrive on things like CSS, A11y, good semantic html, best JS practices and other nerdy things like that 🤓 so I knew I didn't want to settle for "just something that pays well".
After so many interviews I realised a lot of the companies I interviewed with weren't as exciting as they were bragging about in the job ads. Some payed well but were technically unchallenging, others were technically interesting but had a very close minded mindset where "change" was not something they appreciated (which in the tech industry I consider important).
After a while of searching and asking my friends and colleagues about possible companies and not finding anything that felt like it would be a good fit for me I started feeling discouraged.
Intro TL;DR
I felt like a landing page and a job ad are not enough - for people in the tech industry - to understand whether a company is a good fit for them or not.
An Idea
In a reality, like the tech world, where we can actually choose the best career course and opportunity for us I realised there is so much to consider if we're looking for a place to work in: is the pay any good; are the people friendly; are people experienced and willing to teach me; are people humble enough to learn from me; are people friendly enough to hang out at lunch or after work; is the *office comfortable; is the work technically challenging; etc.
This made want to be able to quickly check all this regarding each company. Sure we got reviews on glassdoor that can give us some idea but I want something more than just an overall rating number on a 5 star review saying "Great place to work at!" and something more efficient than reading a 600 word review to be able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the company.
So I decided to make it myself.
WIP
I'm a visual guy so I decided I'd focus on more visual data rather than long text based information.
Planning
I'm not the best at organising work but I knew I needed some tool to help me keep me on track with the work needed to be done so I made a Trello board and started spitting all the ideas I had for the platform.
I started with 3 columns "To Do", "In Progress" and "Done". Soon after I realised there's a lot I don't know about but will eventually need to investigate and when the coding started, naturally, I ended up needing a "bugs" column as well 🐛
Right now my board looks something like this:
Getting started
I'm not a designer but I know my way around Sketch so I designed the mockups and when I wasn't feeling up to it I'd switch to the UI development for some productive fun.
I started working with mocked data and implemented the homepage, company page and the page to review and rate a company.
After a while I was bored of looking at the same mock data so I decided it was time to work with some real data.
I don't really have experience working with back end tools of languages but I figured "Well, I don't feel like paying someone to do this for me so its up to me do get my hands dirty" so I went with a NodeJS express server (since I'm already pretty comfortable with JS) and MongoDB for my data.
This took a heavy toll on my development speed as I new absolutely nothing about MongoDB which was mildly frustrating in the beginning but things are finally getting back on track
Fears
I've been working a lot on this for a few months (on top of my full time job) and there are a lot of concerns I have simply because I'm putting so much effort into this project.
I've released small websites for clients as a freelancer but I've never launched a "real app" on my own and I think I'm not good at marketing so sometimes I get a little stuck on thoughts like: what do I do when my product is finished? I don't have a substantial following on social media so how do I let people know about the app? How do I find and target my key demographic? Should I make a landing page? Should I make a demo video? How would I even plan such video? Should I voice over it? etc. etc.
These are uncomfortable thoughts because that means I will have to step into the unknown and figure things out for myself.
Getting my sh*t together
Seeing communities such as indiehackers' struggle with similar things and overcoming them has been a great inspiration and keeps me on track because I know "if they could do it so can I".
Right now the app isn't even in its MVP so I just put a pin on my concerns and let them rest in my "Investigate" column on trello for when the time comes
I hope I can release a landing/demo page in the next couple of months so I can get some actual feedback from people. Until then I still have some grinding to do 😅
