One-Year Retrospective — Learning, Failing, Achieving

　Hello.

　I’m Tae, a backend developer in charge of server development for the RealWorld service at Uniquegood Company.

　Since joining in July 2021, it’s already been over a year that I’ve been responsible for RealWorld’s server development at Uniquegood Company.

　Since I started studying development the moment I joined, I can also say this marks my first full year as a developer.

　When I first joined, all I could do was marvel at how the experienced engineers worked. A year later, I’ve become someone who works alongside my colleagues. Looking back on the past year, I want to summarize what I learned and achieved, and share what I want to carry forward.

　If you ask what I did for a year…

What I Learned

What I Learned as a Developer

　First, over the past year I learned… pretty much everything, in terms of development knowledge and skill. There was a process of acquiring and getting comfortable with a broad range of development knowledge — CS fundamentals, infrastructure basics, using Git, OOP, C#, Azure, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, and more. How to write and review code, how to design RESTful APIs, how to structure an architecture. I’m deeply grateful to developer Yechan Lee, who taught me through this whole process, and to Hyunwoo Kang, a fellow new hire with prior experience who joined at the same time.

　I especially remember the day I realized why test code is useful, and the day I truly felt the limitations of a monolithic architecture. And at some point I got used to adding tests to logic that previously had none, TDD-style.

　Of course, this isn’t actually how I developed ;;

What I Learned as a Professional

　Learning how to work in a professional setting has also been deeply meaningful, and I’m very grateful for it. Learning development knowledge on the job had real advantages in terms of speed and depth of detail, but it’s not strictly indispensable, since a lot of it can also be self-taught. What I learned on other fronts, though, felt more precious — those were things I could hardly have gained as a student.

　How the company’s workflows and processes operate, how to communicate smoothly with other teams, how to estimate schedules against changing requirements, how to fill in gaps in planning and design, how to decide what information to share with whom and what takes priority — I learned about the structure behind how work actually gets done, the small tricks, and how to do the job properly.

　Also, driving the entire process of building a voting system — from POC, to prototype, to testing, to production — gave me real insight into support and process. Anyone who’s worked at a company can relate: there are moments the work is fun, and moments it’s rather hard, and they come one after another. Learning to set my own mindset so I can enjoy the work I’m given, and toughening myself up to push through the boring stretches, feels like it’ll be a good asset everywhere, not just at this company.

　After all, we’re people who work together :)

What I Wish I’d Done Better

　I had a thirst for database knowledge, but I only covered it at a high level and never dug deep, which is a bit of a regret. I’d like to improve in this area soon by working on database normalization or query optimization.

　I’d also like to take on work in my next project that has a direct impact on the company or its systems, and see the resulting changes in the numbers. I think understanding how much and in what way a performance improvement or new feature affects user satisfaction is important to a product’s success or failure.

　I’d also like to broaden the voting system I built so that it can be used not just by in-house creators but by external creators as well. I felt the voting system product was a powerful tool for highlighting RealWorld’s “interactive” identity, so I hope it can be made available to every creator.

　You can only fix what you first identify as lacking.

What I Achieved

　I spent a long time thinking about how to write this section. I tried to think of what I’d succeeded at, but as is typical for someone early in their career, nothing came to mind right away — it feels more like I’ve just been doing whatever I wanted. Still, if I have to name a few small things I did accomplish, here they are.

2021

　The first thing I remember is building an onboarding assignment right after joining. This project, done in collaboration with developer Hyunwoo Kang, was a huge help in learning to develop. I wrote about this experience on the blog (link), so I recommend giving it a read.

　In the test code adoption project, I carefully added test coverage to all the core server’s major logic.

　In the “My Games” tab project, I built APIs for viewing gameplay history, viewing games I created, and viewing in-app purchase history.

　In the stepping-stone project, I added filtering and sorting for items in the in-game inventory according to the design spec.

　In the admin server’s play-history statistics optimization project, I implemented a serverless pipeline that migrates data from the core server to the statistics server in batches.

　In the gameplay logic change project, I measured server performance before and after the logic change using a load-testing tool called k6. You can read why I chose k6 on the blog (link).

2022

　I updated the game-review notification on Slack.

　I also updated the help-article notification at the same time.

　I planned, developed, reviewed, and shipped the admin server’s game-pass history page.

　I served as PO for the voting system project and brought it to a successful conclusion. The journey from a POC I started on my own, through a prototype, to shipping a full production product together with my colleagues is written up on the blog (link).

　I fixed a memory leak in the account settings server.

　In the MassTransit adoption project, I introduced a MassTransit (link) layer into the event-messaging logic between the gameplay server and the push server.

　In the badge restructuring project, I updated the channel lookup API to work with the newly introduced channel types per the requirements.

　In the RealWorld Seongsu Stamp project, I added all the APIs and data schema for the stamp feature to the studio server.

　Check out the stamp event in the RealWorld app!

What I’m Committing To Going Forward

　Looking back on the past year, these might seem like trivial things to someone else, but I’m glad that these small successes added up to even a small contribution to Uniquegood Company and my team. I’ll keep learning and growing going forward, but a year from now, I hope the trail of learning I’ve shared with my colleagues outweighs what I’ve learned on my own.

　I’ll see you in the next post.

　Thank you for reading this long post.