How was my first experience as a Tech Lead

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Introduction

I wrote on Twitter a little bit about my experience as a Tech Lead and got a lot of feedback about in comment, DM and Discord. With that in mind, I decided to write this post to talk more fully about how the first two weeks were. Also, tell the way I arrived at the company, and the process to get the position.

How was the process to start in the company

At first they came to me through networking. When they made contact, they asked if there was a way for me to become a Front-End programmer for the company. I evidently accepted, explained all my availability and we proceeded to a small interview. In it, we discussed the technologies I felt comfortable with and personal projects, in addition to my salary intention - which was R$2,000 PJ. It is noteworthy that at this point, I had no idea that I would be Tech Lead at some point, ok? It was an interview with a Junior front-end developer.

The selection process

The project was relatively complex. It consisted of developing the front-end of two screens, the first was a landing page and the second an EAD platform. I can't go into too much detail as this test was actually an actual company project they were developing - which hasn't been released yet as of this writing. The biggest challenge was on the second screen, it required me to have some solid CSS concepts.

I delivered everything in a very short time, they had super positive feedback on what I did. I passed everything and now I am officially their developer.

The next steps

I got my first shock early on. I heard that I was the only one to pass the front-end test of the interviewed developers and until then I would be programming with my superior, who developed the back-end. In other words, I was responsible for 100% of the company's front-end. After that, in the first few weeks I already had an inner conflict. I started to get anxious and didn't think I could handle all the work, it was really hard to deliver the front-end of a complete EAD platform in almost two weeks. Anyway, I went and learned a lot with this project, I learned by feeling firsthand the consequences of the mistakes and successes I made during development.

Getting Started as a Tech Lead

The development dynamic was pretty bad to be honest. They didn't use Git, I had to introduce this with the superior and it was a little complicated because he didn't know much how to use Git and such, but no problem, I taught some things and it didn't hurt, we learned every day and it's no different with anyone , so I recorded videos and the like teaching the basics about it. All in my first week of the month, where we deliver the EAD platform.

After that, the second project started, in which I won't go into too much detail either as I can't yet, but because of that I was responsible for my new current development partner. I appointed a person to work as a back-end and I advance that it worked out completely. We managed to deliver the project satisfactorily, and it was the most positive last two weeks for both of us as we learned A LOT.

When this developer came in and passed all the tests, my job as Tech Lead actually started (already with permission from the boss and all). Evidently as someone new, I didn't know most of the things I needed to know to get the job done satisfactorily, so the one week was more negative than positive. Going through this, at the end of the third week of the month, I talked to Sibelius, Camilo, [Castilho](https: //twitter.com/coproduct) and Eduardo, of which I respect and like a lot, especially Sibelius and Edu, who were very important to me indirectly or directly for me to be here.

Sibelius is the guy

We talked a lot, I'm on his Discord server, which has a very nice crowd, and in addition to that conversation, he gave me some articles he wrote for me to apply to the team. As this is a report of the week as a Tech Lead (2 actually) having been employed for 1 month, the comparison and the effects cannot be presented in the long term, but we already had the result of a slightly better leadership in the last one week.

The difference between the penultimate and the last week of the month

I developed the other project along with the new back-end dev, we showed it to the boss and needed to make some changes between them, redo some screens, on behalf of the client. In this last week, we managed to develop 90% of the entire project that we previously took a week in just three days. This is only with the short-term results of the new methodologies I learned with Sibelius. In addition to the faster delivery, we learned a lot more, as I delegated tasks, this way, the dev, in addition to fulfilling its tasks, had the opportunity to evolve in parallel in other areas of the development of a project as a whole. Evidently I didn't delegate and let it go, the process of delegating tasks involves you leaving things you already know to others to focus on more complex ones. I helped and taught a lot of front-end to back-end stuff in the meantime.

With learning, we arrived at the end of the week with the project fully developed, we went through all the challenges of implementing APIs that we had never used, etc. The result was incredible and the superior was extremely happy with the quick delivery and evident evolution of the team.

It's obvious that I made mistakes, both in the month and in the last week, which I said was great, but they were mistakes that delivered great value to me and to the team, feeling under the skin and suffering with the good or bad decisions, which evolves . There's no way to improve being in the comfort zone and several insights that Sibelius passed on about it, helped me to jump into the position and do my best, because with absolute certainty what I'm going through today will bear fruit in the future, and to achieve an experience I couldn't do without risking.