Quite early at the university I participated with some friends on a coding competition which was organized by a banking software company. We made it to the finals. A few days later I got a call from one of the leaders of the organizer company. He asked if I was interested in a chat about some positions at his company. I was really interested. I started a year later, in 2016, and today is my last day here.

The project where I started was in a huge boom back then, so most of the newcomers started there. As I remember, during the first months I really had no idea what I’m doing. But at the end of the first year I had the feeling, that I have a solid understanding about our product, and the technologies we are using. I no longer depended on help of colleagues, in fact, I started to be the one who helps the newcomers. I was even assigned to organize the onboarding process.

This trust gave me lots of confidence, so I started to bring new ideas how we could improve not just our onboarding process, but our workflows in general. I talked to my teammates how we could make some tasks easier and built some tools to support or completely automate the major pain points. One thing I’m really thankful about is that the company was always very opened for these ideas. This period came with lots of improvements, the whole company started to use new technologies, experimented with new ways of working, and I tried to contribute to these experiments as much as I could.

Only after two years I got a senior position, and I got leadership-related tasks, like assigning tasks within the team or supporting our customer. Sometimes and had to provide onsite support as well, a few times in Czech Republic and once in China, it was a huge fun. I really liked this period, this is when I realized that besides software development I’m really interested in organization development too. I think these two have lots in common.

I started my fourth year in a brand new greenfield project. We worked on software platform which consisted of spring boot microservices. This was a really important opportunity for me to gain experience in these state-of-the-art technologies and tools, so I’m really grateful, that I was chosen to be part of this team. But I strongly hope that we did something more than that: besides searching for new ways how we build software, we also searched new ways how we build culture, and, again, this is something I’m really passionate about.

One thing that helped a lot for me on this road was to keep an eye on large enterprises and startups who were one step ahead us on this path finding journey, like Spotify, Netflix or Transferwise. In a way, these companies were my heroes, and I could learn a lot of them. When I got a chance to work for one of these heroes I couldn’t say no.

So here I am, this is my last day in Loxon. It was a perfect first job, and I’m really grateful for everything. Bye.