It was a bit more than a year ago when I decided to move to The Netherlands and start a new chapter in my life. I was happy that Picnic helped me in the relocation process, which made the move for me a lot easier and less overwhelming. My onboarding week was planned with all kinds of presentations, where I not only learned how tech in Picnic is being used, but also how the business operates. We even went through the whole process of how deliveries and groceries get picked in the fulfilment centers, to delivering them as a runner to the customer!
In the first months I was partially with my team getting to learn the code base, working on tickets and being involved in other team processes. The other half of my time I spent in the Picnic Tech Academy with other new joiners. There I learnt how to use technologies like Docker and Kubernetes using best practices explained by experienced Picnic developers. In this environment I had the opportunity to dive deep into specific topics and make sure I understand the fundamentals. I especially enjoyed learning Spring with Victor Rentea and Project Reactor with Oleh Dokuka, as they were experts in those areas and have already taught many other developers. Looking back, I’m very grateful for this opportunity to kickstart my developer career in this way!
Once the scheduled Tech Academy was over I went in three weeks through the Picnic Tech Safari, where I joined a different team each week. During these weeks I met many new colleagues and got insights in how other teams in different domains operate. After that I got more and more involved with the Payments team. I was collaborating on features with my peers, but also across teams like with the Store and Finance teams. The first project I worked on was a migration to a new payments system. The new architecture would allow us to have a more flexible and maintainable system and deliver new features faster. We have abstracted what is being paid for to make the payments system less dependent on orders and allow customers to pay for other things like tips. That was challenging as it required me to learn the old and new system, but I got a deeper understanding of it.
In the last months we have been working on Picnic Saldo. You might have read about it and we’ve already rolled out to a share of customers. It’s a virtual wallet, which optimises when we make smaller transactions for example deposit returns. This was a project that I enjoyed working on a lot, as I was able to contribute from start to finish. From the first steps, brainstorming how it would fit into the payments architecture to implementing the last functionalities. I appreciate that I got the opportunity, just like any other engineer, to influence decisions on how we would design Saldo. I tried to challenge a lot of decisions, to help us build the best solution. Later on when we were implementing it step by step I could just like anyone else pick tickets that I wanted to work on, no matter how complex they were. This gave me the feeling of being a major contributor to the project, which now feels even more rewarding seeing the feature live in production!
A thing that makes Picnic stand out for me is that an environment is created, where I get the opportunity to grow and influence which things I find interesting and want to work on. No matter if you want to participate in additional Tech Academy trainings to learn more about specific technologies or learn from a mentor. I asked for all of this and had the chance with Vasilii and Phil to have mentors, guiding me in the right direction. And if you’re interested in going to a developer conference, there are many opportunities to do so. I was able to attend J-Fall 2024 and hope to do the same for the upcoming Voxxed Days Amsterdam, where Picnic will be the main sponsor!
Looking back at the last year a lot has happened not only for me but also for Picnic. I’m looking forward to what 2025 has to offer, which projects the Payments team will tackle next and all the learnings that will come. It was exciting to meet the new group of juniors starting this year and being able to share my experience with them. The biggest advice, which I would give to everyone starting their first developer job, is to use the onboarding time to learn as much as possible. Try to absorb all the knowledge from experienced engineers. Challenge yourself and choose tasks you are not sure how to solve, because doing those you’ll learn the most and there will always be a senior engineer to help you out when feeling stuck. Shoutout to Erdem and my other team members who helped me a lot. Also Tobiasz, who helped me onboard and just like me went through the Tech Academy.
Experiences of a first year Java developer at Picnic was originally published in Picnic Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
