Developer Diaries: Week 1 - Getting up to speed
Tags: javascript, react, documentation
Published: 2021-09-09 20:21:38

It's my first full week as a developer at Elastic!
![andy parks and rec celebrate](https://media.giphy.com/media/S9i8jJxTvAKVHVMvvW/giphy.gif)

It was great, my biggest complaint is that I've felt half dead with a horrible sinus infection. But I've still enjoyed my week, so that says a lot. :) 

Thankfully my manager set the expectation from the start of "Don't worry about immediately building a bunch of things... take your time to onboard and learn and get up to speed." So mostly what I've done this week is review docs about my projects I'll be working on. (The main one is a support tool for our customers to submit cases to us. There's not any public documentation about it yet, but there will be soon and I'll share the blog post here!)

I've started setting up meetings with various members of the team to learn about how different parts of the team work, what we manage, and all the systems and tools we use. There's... a lot. but I'm slowly starting to wrap my mind around some of them. 

I also got to learn about how our sprints work. It's funny because I knew agile and sprints were a thing before I moved into dev land, as I've been operating my life in a sprint for the past several years. I love agile methodologies and I'm excited for a place where that's normal rather than "oh... what is a sprint? and what do you mean by story points?"

Some new tools I'm learning about... AWS Lambda? Zube? PagerDuty? Still working on learning all the ins and outs of these... um especially AWS (there's like a million tabs in there... who designed this menu?)

![image (13).png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1625878157166/7ZzPwueOc.png)

I've really gained an appreciation for good documentation and people who wrote things down, organized info in slides, and tried to think of questions someone new to this might have.

I also started diving into best tips and practices for developers as I'm starting to develop those habits. Here are some I've come across that I'm planning to implement. 

- Write down every day what i worked on, something i learned
- Good naming pattern for new branches is bug/issue12323/fewWordsDescription
- Use [Oh Shit Git](https://ohshitgit.com/) when you messed up something with git
- Always run a PR when you're reviewing someone's
- Review your own code and get in the habit of a self review
- Learn to think in a [maker's schedule](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)
- Use Pomodoro timer and make sure to take breaks


And I even got to code a good bit this week, too! I worked on two issues, finishing up some form validation pieces on a form I'm working on for our app, and then also had to do some crazy debugging on a timestamp issue. (Shout out to Andy for help on that, because I'd have never figured out the issue there without him.)

![ezgif com-gif-maker (1)](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/16166290/124186600-2c5f9f80-da82-11eb-9a52-f6f8ba22f295.gif)



## Main takeaways

I'll usually try to have these better organized into sections and not just a rambling list of things I did and learned. But for now, my main takeaways were: 

- Good docs matter
- Don't be afraid to ask for help and ask questions


That's all for now folks! See ya next week!