“Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.”

• Martin Luther King, Jr

This journey to becoming a software engineer has taken many twists and turns and I'm still progressing along the way. January 2022 marked a new step in that direction. This marked the time in which I officially became a Develop Carolina Fellow. This fellowship allows me to learn how to become a better software engineer by learning practices and procedures specific to software engineering and being a craftsman of my work and by working side by side with a master software craftsman at a host company. The company that I have the privilege of being involved with is Hyper.

Let me provide a brief description of Hyper, which has been obtained from Hyper's website, which you can find here. Hyper "is a dev-ops team wrapped in a single API. One consistent, frictionless API to manage data, cache, storage, search, and queue services. hyper promotes clean architecture application development." Now, that was a mouthful. Try saying that ten times fast. Basically Hyper is a development platform built for developers by developers. Hyper was built "dev tough". "Have you developed in hyper lately?" "Hyper: we build dev-ops so you don't have to." Here's how Simon Sinek would probably say it, "Hyper, we have been through your struggles, gone through your pitfalls. We have been through your valley experience and we're here to provide you a way out. Will you take it? We provide a consistent, frictionless API to manage your data, cache, storage, search, and queue services with a nearly pain-free experience, dev-ops that even non-developers can easily understand. A clean, dev-ops experience, by design." I think we have a winner here.

Coming from a bootcamp experience, there were some expectations that I had been led to believe was the de facto standard for software development. The first of these was definitely stand up meetings. I was conditioned to expect morning standup meetings, evening merge meetings, lots and lots of meetings. At Hyper, development happens at the speed of light. (Ha! I like that one too.) While we do have morning meetings occasionally. Most of the information that would typically be gathered in a standup meeting, we acquire from lengthy Slack discussions. Creativity and innovation, within the confines of the product we're building, is lauded and encouraged. The development team is small intentionally. Another thing that I wasn't aware of was the amount of automation that is used. Hyper emphasizes automation, tight feedback cycles, issue tracking in which issues are usually labeled as Features, Fixes, or Enhancement, and a bottoms up programming approach, with an emphasis on clean architecture and clean code. It really is amazing to see how productive, efficient, and innovative the team at Hyper is with such a small team. In my mind, I was envision teams of developers with product managers, project managers, product and project champions, hustling to write the next version of great software that is going to take their company to the next level. I was also envisioning me, a virtual recluse at times, hermit, as introverted as they come, being lost in the shuffle, a peg in a perpetual wheel that would keep turning regardless of whom it tramples on.

Working with Hyper required a shift in thinking, a shift in behavior, a willingness to accept instruction and grow not only as a software developer but as a person. There are so many things that I can learn from my mentors at Hyper, so many things that I have already learned. This experience so far has been amazing. I've been exposed to architectures, techniques, frameworks, and ways of thinking that I probably wouldn't have learned anywhere else. All of my mentors have years of coding experience and are doing their best to direct me along the right path. Every day there's a progression, something new to learn, some new way to grow. I look forward to growing with Hyper and Develop Carolina and I will continue to update you on my progression.