Don’t let the title fool you, I am incredibly grateful for the community and hospitality of my host company, truly. They fostered an environment for me where I could speak my own mind and placed my ideas on the same platform as everyone else. Not only are they good mentors, but good friends as well. Happy hour with them was always a total joy. After 17:00, work hierarchies dissolved and memorable times were had, whether that be hanging out on a bench one-on-one, or getting the group together to sing our hearts out at the karaoke booth.

But during working hours, praise always felt a little too easy to get.

Right now, freshly minted software developers have it rougher than usual. With interest rates rising, companies issuing mass layoffs, and companies asking for 5-10+ years of experience with a given technology on job postings, I knew that I needed to come into this experience hitting the ground running.

So I did what any other motivated software engineer would do, and hit the books earlier this summer before I came. I started with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the like. As my projects required more data transfer and layered functionality I moved into React land, learned TypeScript (the GOAT), and the glue that holds the internet together, REST fetch() requests.

I could go on about the gazillion different frameworks I explored and tinkered with this summer, but that isn’t really important here. What matters is that I came in with all of these skills, and did not use a single one of them (sans a tiny bit of CSS). They were using WordPress!

Should be a cakewalk of a two months then right? Nope. The freelancer that came before me had a tight grip over the content management and plugin system. This would be fine, but the system was a mess. It loads in 5 times the amount of data compared to your average site, and every single one of the 131 published pages was created completely manually by hand. There were so many plugins for different obscure features, that the editor would lock up constantly due to the load and “forget” data I had stored in drafts.

I have been working within this system for nearly 2 months now, and looking back, I have made a lot of small victories over my time working. The buttons are animated and lively, their blog is partially automated, their logos are updated to be high res, and more. My co-workers have been elated, and they’re so glad that any kind of progress is being made. I’m proud of what I accomplished, and I believe that I executed these changes with the tact and intentionality that I expect from my own work.

But when I look at this work and compare it to my own side projects, I can’t help but feel like I didn’t go nearly far enough. Looking back at my task manager before I leave, I still have plenty of mini-projects that were left unfinished, bugs that were never squashed, and features that just got binned. There’s still so much left to do, even after I’m gone.

My manager does not blame any of this on me at all, but it leaves me feeling a little bit of lingering disappointment. Sure, HSE takes my time away at the company as a major success, but what does that matter if I feel like I failed for leaving so much still on the table? Never quite feeling like I made a “finished product”. My company gave me a ton of flexibility on when I came in during the mornings. Maybe if I came in an hour earlier, or stayed an hour later, I would be exactly where I want to be.

Maybe that rational approach to creation is just part of the German culture, but I always feel like I want to strive to create something bigger than the sum of its parts. To make a machine that is as complex as it is bulletproof. That idealism feels very “American Silicon Valley” to me, and I feel like I carried a bit of that with me to Berlin.

Ultimately, success is what you make of it, but that’s precisely the problem. In the future, will these kinds of narrow victories slide? Hard to say. It’s definitely worked out very well for me here, but I am also looking at the long game. The US market is a different beast. Good news is, I got plenty of time to get there.

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