Software Developer

The system

My first role with real ownership. Prospeer’s product was a full-stack web application — Django and DRF behind, a React client in front — and I worked across both.

Features rather than architecture. The ones I remember are a document upload and preview flow, a notifications system, and the long tail of admin screens the internal team lived in all day.

What was hard

Reading a codebase I had not written. The first month was mostly comprehension. I learned to trace a request end to end before changing anything, which is still how I approach an unfamiliar system.

Knowing when to ask. I lost most of a week to a caching bug a colleague recognised in ten minutes. The lesson was not “ask sooner” so much as “put a time limit on it, and say what you have already tried.”

Admin screens are real software. The internal tools were where I first understood that the person on the other side of a form has a job to do, and that a bad flow quietly costs someone hours a week.

What I would do differently

I wrote very few tests and paid for it later. The features from that year that survived are the ones I eventually covered. Two that I never did were rewritten by someone else.