My journey to Arkency world

Do you feel the need for a change?

How did it start?

My developer’s career started in one of Wrocław corporations as a Java Developer. For most of my studies I had been developing my knowledge about that technology so It was effortless for me to work in that language. I had been working for that company for almost a year, but I didn’t really feel it. Something was wrong. Days were similar to each other. I was working in mode “Daily meeting -> coffee -> fix old problem -> coffee etc.”. I started to think about it and I came to conclusion that I have to change something.

A few months ago I went to local IT meeting. Robert Pankowecki had there his lightning talk about Async Remote and he was speaking about the style of work in Arkency. Thanks to his speech, I learned that you can work in a different way and I thought that “This is it!”. After the meeting I started to look for information about Arkency (then I found this blog) and despite the lack of information about the application process I sent my application anyway. This is how things changed for me.

Begginings are difficult.

Before I came to Arkency I talked a lot with my former work mates about being remote. In my case I heard many times that I was less experienced and It would be hard to work asynchronously. I would need to get a lot knowledge transferred on me and this would require spending many hours on talking, which would be difficult to do remotely. But we use technologies which helped me in that case. We use technologies such as hackpad, screencasts or simply slack which help us to share knowledge. There I can find all the information I need if not there is always fast mumble session. I think those means of communication are even better than standard contact between people (please don’t understand me wrong;)) because I can go back easily to what we talked about earlier and I don’t waste anyone’s time.

I started my work almost from scratch. New language, technologies, type of work (remote) and project. I wasn’t a very experienced as a developer and it would seem that it would be hard for me to bring value in the project fast. But I’ve noticed It isn’t true. The way we manage work made it easier for me to enter the company. The way we manage tasks - creating small tickets, getting first top task and not assigning story to anybody, all this has meant that I got to know business logic and used technology. In the previous company I often had to work on some modules that I was familar with before and that was supposed to speed up my performance. But this resulted in me exploring just a part of the system and it took long to get to know the logic behind the domain. After a month in Arkency, I gained virtually the entire knowledge about the system.

Conclusion

I’m very happy that I tried both the standard office work and my current “Arkency-way” work. I can see all pros and cons of both types of work and now I know that the current work type suits me better. It was one of the many life changes and there is an important lesson that I learned. If you see that you can’t fit somewhere or you can’t find yourself in some situation simple listen to yourself and change it. You can win a lot.