Albania 
Czech Republic 
Deutschland 
Greece 
Hungary 
Ireland 
Italy 
Luxembourg 
Netherlands 
Portugal 
Romania 
Spain 
United Kingdom 
Asia-Pac Middle East 
Turkey 
DR Congo 
Egypt 
Ghana 
Kenya 
Lesotho 
Mozambique 
Nigeria 
South Africa 
Tanzania 
Introduction
Ever thought about how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly? That’s a bit of how I felt moving from a front-end engineer to a full-stack developer. I’ve been at Vodafone for nearly two years. In the early days, my focus was heavily on the front end. I worked in one of the teams responsible for customer accounts. It’s the side of the business that makes a huge impact on shaping customer experiences. I’ve always taken pride in the work I and the rest of the team have been doing.
When I joined the team, the project was neat and shiny, and we did a really good job keeping it sparkling. We spend a lot of time refining, developing and then reviewing our code to make sure every new piece of code is consistent with the rest of the code base. I had the privilege of working with cutting-edge tools including ReactJS, MobX, NX, Cypress and many more.
A significant part of the work involved integrating existing components from Vodafone’s global component framework with data provided by the back-end team, which required a lot of collaboration between teams. This served as a remarkable chance for me to communicate with lots of different people and gain immense insights from them. Within the team, I concentrated on polishing my front-end knowledge, while my training time was dedicated to broadening my skill set in other areas. I was enjoying what I do on a daily basis.
I chose to venture into the realm of AWS as part of my learning journey. Cloud computing has become increasingly popular in recent years, and a good understanding of it is crucial. At Vodafone, we are provided with a number of different resources which became instrumental in levelling up this skill. Over the span of 3 months, I went through numerous online video courses on the subject. In order to practice what I learned, I build small side projects and play AWS Cloud Quest. Additionally, Vodafone facilitated a live online workshop led by a tutor from AWS, who provided an in-depth walkthrough of the most frequently used services, greatly solidifying my understanding. Motivated by this intensive training, took to the initiative to take the cloud practitioner certification exam and thankfully passed.
Then I was seeking the next challenge. The NodeJS world felt like a natural progression. Leveraging my JS experience and newfound knowledge of cloud computing, I found the exploration of back-end development increasingly captivating. Over the following six months, I spent my training time in NodeJS video courses, tried a number of SQL and NoSQL databases, built projects and experimented with an array of concepts.
Eventually, I wanted to utilise these new skills in my day-to-day job. However, given the project scope, this wasn’t something that was possible with my current team due to the nature of the project. We were focused heavily on the front-end, our infrastructure was already in place and we didn’t have any need to do anything in AWS ourselves.
