10 months into my first dev job — here's what actually changed my thinking
Started 10 months ago thinking the job was basically writing code and fixing bugs. Turns out that's like 40% of it.
Some context — I've shipped 200+ REST APIs across different projects, built a School ERP as a freelance side project (now actually used by 500+ students/staff at a school), and done a bunch of production deployments (VPS, DNS, SSL, the whole mess).
Things that actually shifted for me:
Writing code that works locally means nothing. Writing code that survives production, weird client environments, and users doing unexpected things — that's the actual job.
I gravitated toward backend/DevOps stuff way more than frontend. Something about deployments, CI/CD, infra just clicked more for me than UI work.
Client calls taught me more about "requirements" than any tutorial. What people ask for and what they actually need are often different things.
Debugged a production issue once around midnight — turned out to be one misconfigured env variable that nobody had touched in months. That one hurt but taught me a lot about how fragile "it works" can be.
Genuinely the part I enjoy most: picking up a task and watching it go from "in progress" to actually live. That feeling hasn't worn off yet.
Curious what others who're \~1 year in felt shifted the most for them — was it a specific incident, a mentor, or just time?