I have been working for 8 months as a web developer at Talkative, a tech startup located in South Wales. There I was presented with Laravel, one of the top PHP Frameworks out there. After spending a bit of time getting familiar with the MVC pattern and the way Laravel handles it, I was quickly tasked with refactoring a critical controller as well as writing tests for this beast.
I did not realize how daunting it would be to optimize code that was three year old on a mid sized web app ! Fortunately, helpful colleagues were available to see me through the hardest parts of this challenge. PhpUnit became also quickly familiar and it was a nice introduction to the world of unit testing.
At the same time, I took part in customizing our product with CSS for clients, and deploy using various methods.
This great experience helped me realize that I might be more of a front end web developer than a backend one. Structuring backend parts of the app, modifying the architecture without having any impact on the interface might not be my favorite part of being a developer.
All in all, this was a great experience and I learned heaps thanks to the great people at Talkative.
Now I am looking for new opportunities, oriented towards modern Front End development like ReactJS or VueJS. I have realized that taking into account the look and feel of a website or an app is a key element to my well-being in a Web developer job.