I’ve been working with a MuleSoft consultancy for the last year. This position was my first software engineering role since graduation. This month I was promoted to Lead Engineer. This was based on my performance review that took place last month. As such, I thought I’d share some notes from the performance review.
2021 was a busy year. I began working with my current company in late April. I was new to MuleSoft so began training immediately. I passed the MuleSoft Certified Developer (MCD) test on my first try after 2 months of studying.
After that, I worked with several clients and received awards in recognition of the work I completed with them. I received the Ace Award acknowledging my work ethic and perseverance in working against a tight deadline to meet the client’s targets. I also received the Raving Reviews Award - the client sent a glowing review after the project was completed - from another client where I was the sole developer on the project.
I also advanced my understanding and expertise in MuleSoft development and was able to create API solutions for clients with increasing independence. For one client, I migrated several APIs from Mule 3 to Mule 4, wrote tests, design documents, and testing documents. I also contributed enhancements for other APIs. For another client, I claimed ownership on several development tasks and created several integrations. For my previous client, I created all of the APIs for the project on my own along with required tests. I was also able to dive in to one of their existing APIs and leverage the new integration assets.
The culture of mentorship and continual learning at my company has been instrumental in achieving my goals and becoming a better software engineer. Everyone is always ready to help each other. When I get stuck, there is always someone I can ask and this makes it easy to overcome hurdles. I am a strong believer in learning by doing and teaching. Helping and teaching others reinforces one’s own understanding of concepts. Dedicated Slack channels for sharing technical knowledge and asking questions give everyone an opportunity to share what they have learned and to help colleagues along the way.
In terms of moving forward, I want to expand by breadth and depth of understanding of the MuleSoft ecosystem. I hope to achive this by participating in additional MuleSoft training, taking greater initiative in future projects, and challenging myself with tasks I haven’t worked on before. I also want increase my understanding of DevOps tools (e.g. CI/CD) and testing strategies to ensure that systems are always functioning as expected in all scenarios. Well-designed DevOps pipelines make development workflows more efficient and boost productivity. Well-developed test suites give confidence that applications will run smoothly when it matters most and enhancements aren’t breaking existing functionality.
Something I should perhaps do a bit differently is documenting my learning. I should take more notes and document new things I spend my time learning so I have references for future. Occasionally, I spend some time to learn a new concept over the course of doing another task, only to forget some key details about it once its utility has passed. If I were to take notes of those concepts, I may not need to refresh my memory anew if that situation arises again. Likewise, I should document and keep references of common engineering/design patterns to make it easier to implement them in the future.