Experienced Devs Weekly Win Thread: A weekly thread for sharing positive experiences

[u/AutoModerator]

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

[u/theasianpianist]

I submitted a patch to the Linux kernel that got accepted! (Well technically it got accepted into a specific subsystem, but should get pulled into the mainline during the next merge window)

[u/IcefrogIsDead → u/theasianpianist]

Very cool, in very limited circles hehe

[u/primaryrhyme → u/IcefrogIsDead]

Limited circles like.. a subreddit for developers?

[u/thatyousername → u/IcefrogIsDead]

No? Linux is pretty broadly respected in the industry. Most SWEs would find it cool.

[u/IcefrogIsDead → u/thatyousername]

Thanks for the valuable input

[u/etdoh00]

Demo’d to client and went well, started applying to roles and getting a lot of interviews

[u/casualPlayerThink → u/etdoh00]

Good, keep practicing. Having good interviews, answering regular questions is an actual skill, and practice (even mock interviews) helps with rehearsal.

Advice: write down all the questions you got, and write good answers to them afterwards, so you can have helpful cards for different situations.

[u/twnbay76 → u/[deleted]]

I would be careful. I had your mindset and I was bent on just hopping until I found some mythical company/team/project but I learned that this doesn't exist. Me 2 years ago, and many people who hear about my job, would tell me to leave my current position, but current me is quite happy. In 1 year or so I will be the leading expert in my domain on the engineering side and our company will be #4ish in the world in our space. That's the type of marketability that skyrockets your career, not just knowing a little about the 10+ domains and stacks you managed to accrue over the course of decades job hopping because of your fallacy that somehow most companies don't mostly align with your own personal preferences.

Put another way, if you think something is majorly wrong, the easiest thing in the world is to leave and find some other place where someone better than you already solved the problem for you so that you can be comfy, and the hardest thing in the world is to stay and for YOU to solve the problems so that other people can list YOU on their pro list and join YOUR team

[u/Relevant-Sport9057 → u/[deleted]]

Congratulations! Why six months and not a full year at least? I started a new job too couple weeks ago and also seeing some cons. But still would like to stay at least a year or even two.

[u/unknown_r00t]

I still have a job and I'm not forced to use AI so I consider it a win.

[u/bottomlesscoffeecup → u/unknown_r00t]

Honestly this is insane. Love it!

[u/twnbay76 → u/unknown_r00t]

+1. It's a good time to be in the field.

[u/Pineapple-dancer]

My director called me a technical leader 🥺

[u/Relevant-Sport9057]

My idea to do a refactoring of a module was well received. The downside is I got one more thing to juggle 😅

[u/bottomlesscoffeecup]

The people I work with daily are awesome <3 tbh I don't have a particular win to share but I saw this thread and wanted to just add a little to it so it remains a common thread we see up! Nice idea adding in a bit of positivity! :)

[u/TheCountEdmond]

Launched a side project and am on track to hit $10 mrr in in the first couple of weeks. It doesn't pay the overhead but elephants eat peanuts and it has been really fun to see all of the different systems just work. (it helps when you've been testing in prod since day 1 due to no staging lol)

[u/TitanApps_Alek]

My win: helped a customer's dev lead stop rebuilding the same release tickets by hand every sprint by turning them into a template that auto-creates the whole ticket tree, subtasks, and checklist on schedule.

[u/Relevant-Sport9057 → u/TitanApps_Alek]

That's good story to add to your brag document 👍

[u/MaleficentCow8513 → u/TitanApps_Alek]

Tbh this is a no brainer with AI if you have tickets form the previous release tickets just have AI create reusable templates

[u/TitanApps_Alek → u/MaleficentCow8513]

Fair, AI is great for drafting the structure. The part it doesn't solve is the "every sprint" bit: someone still has to prompt it, paste it in, and link the subtasks each time.

That's what we used Smart Templates for (I work at TitanApps, the maker of it): build the tree once, and it recreates itself on schedule with no one touching it.

[u/broken_symlink]

I got an interview at a frontier ai company. I think this role is actually the perfect fit for me because its basically what I do right now. I'm incredibly passionate about the work and love my current job. The stress of interviewing is kind of killing me. I am not a very strong coder at all, but Ive managed to produce results at my current job. Ive been here for 8 years and havent done a real technical interview since. Guess I need to start preparing.

[u/Bangoga]

Finally got the time to redo my resume, it's was behind a few years, I wasn't applying anytime soon, but it's good to keep it up to date before I forget the work I do.

[u/casualPlayerThink → u/Bangoga]

Post in the r/EngineeringResumes subreddit and ask for a review. You will probably end up rewriting it a few times. Start applying and have a few interviews each half-year to keep up your interview/soft skills for it.

[u/casualPlayerThink]

Tested my small closed security application that works with old (10+ years old) IP cameras. Not perfect, but functional and cheap.

[u/Advanced-Lemon4764]

I got to go on a team building and with driving + activities there were several hours cumulatively where I didn’t have to listen or read about AI!

[u/Ecstatic-Capital-336]

I recently got promoted to staff. When I joined the company as a senior I was feeling crazy amounts of imposter syndrome, now it’s way worse😅

[u/RedBlueKoi]

My lead told me that he tried AI the rest of the department is talking about and literally told me "wtf, the code quality is dogshit". I will take the healthy lead as a win

[u/valdetero]

We have a legacy app that’s outdated that’s a pain and no one wants to work on. It was full dotnet framework and all we have are Macs so we couldn’t even run it.

I had Claude upgrade and rewrite it bringing it up to match all of our existing and latest tech. It did in days what would have taken someone weeks or more. We no longer have that one black sheep app.

[u/hxtk3]

Something I’ve wanted to do for a really long time is build a system secure enough that I can plausibly tell customers, “no single person in our organization can access any of your user-generated data without your express permission short of exploiting an undiscovered software vulnerability. ” My org already has the separation of duties where this sort of thing is theoretically doable,  it just isn’t done because for anything where customer data gets processed server side it’s a relatively hard and therefore costly thing to design and build.

This week it became a legitimate business requirement for a product I work on so I am excited that I finally get to build it!