My First Year as a Software Engineer

On July 28, 2025 I received my first offer for full-time employment as a Software Engineer; this is a recap of my first year in the field.

I cried tears of joy on that day after I received my employment offer; years of learning, building, reading, watching, stress, burnout, etc... all of the negatives vanished upon me getting that offer from Robert on the last day of my week-long work trial for FirstLook. Something that has stuck with me since then is what he messaged me in Slack that day:

I'm pleased to let you know we're eager to move forward with you! The team has been loving your presence, work and attitude... I don't think I ever met a 'junior' this well prepared for his first full-time engineering job, you've impressed everyone. It's super deserved.

🤯

For those of you that don't know or recall, I had been studying front-end web development on and off since late 2018 (I've confirmed this since my first blog post was written on Dev.to in July 2019). I learned after work and on weekends, and while I had no official schooling on it, I'd like to say I was community-taught rather than self-taught; I took part in a cohort, apprenticeship, group projects, and more working my way into the field.

My first month

As surreal as getting the job offer was, getting to wake up and do this work for a living was just as surreal. Honestly it was pretty wild just jumping into things; I suppose that is par for the course for startups, but especially so for us as we had Gamescom quickly approaching so my first stint of work was helping to get our main page for that up and running! I was told that wasn't the norm but I was just happy to be there.

One thing that surprised me was how different the culture is here than at my previous jobs as a Buyer in a couple of different corporations. It makes sense, but I definitely did my fair share of corporate drama-dumping earlier in my time at FirstLook because I genuinely can't get over how great it is to work there.

Spoiler alert: I still can't get over it.

How have things changed?

A lot can change in a year and this one is no different! While I have done an annual retro (retrospective) for the last two years (2024 + 2025) and plan on doing another this year, I wanted to talk quickly about the things that have changed the most in the last year and reserve everything else for the eventual retro.

I spend a lot of time right where I want to be: focusing on design, UI (user interface), UX (user experience), and a11y (accessibility). I am incredibly happy and lucky that my continued attention to detail is appreciated by co-workers.

While I can't say I have more responsibility today than when I started, the depth at which I work on things has increased and that I think is partly due to my skills increasing but also the trust in me from others at work which is pretty awesome.

One example of working deeper is the ongoing project of designing, defining, and constructing a design system while continuing to build out multiple products, ensuring our code and components work across all of them, and slowly but surely updating the design of FirstLook. I definitely plan on talking more about this in future posts because it feels like one of the most ambitious things I've ever taken on and am just happy it's not all on me!

My use of AI now vs then

TL;DR: I didn't use AI at all when I started this job; now I use it for 80% of the work I do.

There are no firm expectations from management to use it, though it is encouraged. Naturally I found myself interested in using it, though I'll admit I was, and still am, behind the adoption of what I see others do with it on Twitter. However, I’m okay with that.

I find I'm hesitant to jump to try every new tool or model that comes out because I have work to get done and know I'm not as productive if I'm learning how to work with new models or software every week. That being said, AI has been a big part of the work I've done in the last year.

AI has certainly allowed me to build faster and usually get UIs 80% of the way there. It also allows for rapid prototyping in code rather than working in Figma first, designing things over the course of days/weeks and then building them out. The last 20% of the work are the real details that can take more time to iron out such as UX, a11y, animations, and more. The last 20%, in my opinion, is really where the craft comes into play and it's the part I love the most.

That said, using AI can also have its drawbacks apart from the environmental and cost-associated ones. I'm exploring how I am choosing to use AI in a responsible manner and will share what I've learned in a follow-up post in the next couple of weeks!

My design and engineering skills

I think they've improved.

I kid, of course they've improved, but I don't stop learning! Every time I work on something new I aim to improve upon my work from last time. It is really interesting going from designing and building my own projects to a real product. Not only that but with other people that have thoughts and opinions on how things should work and look… there is a lot to take into account.

There is, of course, a lot to learn and I'm so happy to be able to continue to focus on not only the details, but the projects as a whole. For example, my stubbornness to budge on certain things like a11y may be annoying sometimes but I know it's for the greater good.

Below is an example of how I think I've improved. While the first design isn't bad, I never felt 100% happy with it. The new to me feels far more refined and much more me. The best part is that I'm actually happy with some of the craft I've put into it, animations included!

Life outside of work

As mentioned above, I'll save most of the details for my future 2026 retrospective, but life outside work is... boring, and I'm very much okay with that! My current goal is to move to Austin, TX in February 2027 and a lot of that goal is to get myself in the best financial position possible. This would not be possible without this job, so I am incredibly thankful that I've been able to pay off all my debt, substantially improve my credit score, and save a lot of money.

This all is no doubt thanks to me getting this job but also my family for making space for me and allowing me to live rent-free. I don't take any of this for granted and am eternally grateful.

Outside of finances, getting the job has alleviated so many feelings of self-doubt, anxiety, and has instead replaced that with a feeling of calm. Not to mention that I'm a year in now and have received positive feedback multiple times throughout it; I know I am actually good at what I do. My depression also has basically vanished letting my previously undiagnosed ADHD come into the spotlight which I was diagnosed with late 2025.

Do I still learn outside of work?

Hell yeah I do! Though I took a long time away from designing and building outside of work hours, I still consumed articles, videos, and more.

You can even look at my GitHub contribution graph and see that since August 2025 my weekends were largely free of contributions and has only picked up since some time in June 2026.

It's not because I suddenly I didn't like the work, but because I finally felt like I could rest, I finally didn't have that looming thought that any time outside of work I didn't spend increasing my skillset was wasted time.

However, I knew I wouldn't stay away forever which is why recently I've picked up some work on my personal dashboard project and refined the design of my personal site.

The next project I'd like to build is a watchlist and tracker for shows and moves people recommend. If you know me well enough you'll also know there is a lot of media I've not consumed and while I'm largely focused on anime at the moment, I'm slowly but surely working through an ever-growing backlog of media to watch.

Looking Forward

During my time at FirstLook, we've restructured internally a couple of times to try and figure out how we navigate building three different yet related products. That means that more recently we've split us engineers into different pods focused on different products. With that came the ask that we all think and work more like Product Engineers which is a relatively new term in the field. I'm happy to say that I've already been working largely with that mindset.

However, I'm not perfect! I feel my biggest weakness is not being truly capable of full-stack engineering. My goal has always been to be a full-stack engineer so I am capable of doing everything, though I still want to stay within my design, UI, UX, and a11y forte. While I'm currently leaning on AI to write Rust anytime I need changes on our backend alongside with the new stuff I'm building on the frontend, I really want to learn it so as not be a liability to the team and be able to more meaningfully contribute.

Let me be clear that no one at work is making me feel this way, it is all self-imposed. Suffice to say I want to do the very best I can and that means becoming more well-rounded. So in the next year along with continuing to hone my design and frontend craft, I'd like to become more comfortable working with Rust on the backend along with general database work. That being said, I'm thankful our backend repo is so strong that AI has a hard time messing anything up too badly!

I'd also like to talk at a conference next year! It's something I sort of put off this year as I wanted to focus purely on the job and not stretch my finances by traveling too much.