There are no dull days at Gofore. There is always something to learn and chances to challenge me. When one project ends, there is always a new opportunity to choose the next interesting project. As a software developer, I’m constantly interested in learning more, and hey now I have also seen what large-scale Spring Boot projects look like.
When we were having discussions about open projects in Gofore I saw there was an opening in Aimo Park. After hearing about what the project was all about and stuff that I would be doing I was completely sold. One could say Aimo Park project had a parking reservation in my heart after hearing what the project was all about.
Few words about Aimo Park for those who don’t know them. Aimo Park is a leading parking company in the Nordic region with close to 370 000 parking spaces. Gofore has been working with Aimo Park since 2016.
”I’ve fallen in love with doing backend stuff”
So, what I’ve been up to in Aimo Park project? I have been working as a backend microservice developer for the mobile application team. My job consists mostly of implementing features to microservices that the mobile application needs. The technologies that I have been working with most are Java Spring Boot microservices. As I said before, I had really focused on frontend technologies and learning about JavaScript’s quirks, and so on. But with this project, I’ve fallen in love with doing backend stuff more and more.
Prior to this project, I had experience with Java from school, and I had done a small internal project with it in my previous workplace. I was excited to see what large-scale Spring Boot projects would look like in Aimo Park. And I must say that I’ve been loving it. My only gripe with Java was previously how verbose it can get in some parts (getters, setters, etc.). Luckily, we use Lombok which in my opinion makes Java so much nicer to develop. It strips down, for example, all the verbose parts with special annotations that make it also much cleaner. Plus, other features that I probably haven’t even discovered yet. If I’d have to say something negative, one thing would be that I slightly dislike how much Spring Boot Automagically™ does behind the scenes. I’ve also had a chance to try out my TypeScript skills briefly in a couple of tickets related to mobile application development, which has been really nice change of pace.
A big part of my role also involves communicating with the microservices team about implementation details and so on. This also means that my merge requests are reviewed by people in the microservice team as I mostly work on their domain, and I must say that I’ve learned a lot from their comments and advice in merge requests. I love how everyone always helps me when I have questions about some business logic or something related to code. It’s also nice to have somebody who I can ask “dumb” questions about inner workings of Java and Spring Boot if I can’t find something with just Googling. I only have positive things to say about people that I’ve been communicating with (be it from my team, microservices team or somebody from Aimo Park business side).
Best: taking breaks together with the team
Besides other positive things in this project, I would say my favourite one is the Mandatory Fun event that is hosted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There we get together to play some entertaining games with all the people from the whole Aimo Park project for 15-20 minutes. Games have usually been either Kahoot or Skribbl but new suggestions are always welcomed with open arms. My absolute favourite is Skribbl, as there I can bring out my artistic side with my laptop’s touchpad ? These events lighten up the mood in the project and I get to meet up with people that I don’t usually work within the project.
Overall, as a recent graduate, I would give Aimo One project 10/10. I have learned so much from the project’s domain and the people working there. There is always something new to do and research and the daily workday never gets dull.
