As much as I love software engineering, I can openly admit that front-end development is not my forte. For personal projects my focus has largely gravitated towards back-end work that I enjoy, but at the end of the day I want my job title to be software engineer and not back-end engineer. My goal for this quarter was not to work on a specific technology, but to take on the role of team player and work on whatever the team needed support in. My team this quarter mainly consisted of back-end developers, so I mentioned I would be open to doing front-end work if no one else on the team wanted to. As much as I wanted to work on some OpenAI and LangChain tech, I can also recognize that someone needs to build the GUI. Based on our conversation with the sponsor and researching what frameworks would work best with our use case, we settled with React + TypeScript. Aside from the experience with C from Operating Systems, working with types is still a relatively new experience for me. It took some getting used to, but eventually I got the hang of it, and I am proud of myself for that. Combining React + TypeScript felt very weird at first, but eventually I got the hang of it. The more experience I gain working with TypeScript, the more I cannot be without it. The amount of time I am saving, simply by adding types, was well worth the time invested learning this new technology.
Becoming familiar with TypeScript and relearning React made me remind myself not to be boxed in with specific job titles and to take any new opportunities with an learning first mindset. In the real world we are not always going to get to choose what technologies or frameworks we want to work with. Our work does not exist in a vacuum. Software engineering is collaboration. The most important thing in any project is coordination/ communication among group members and the ability to compromise on solutions. If everyone wanted to work on the LLM and no one wants to participate in building the GUI, then we have an incomplete project. I did not miss out on the opportunity to work on a LLM, but instead gained valuable experience building a website UI using modern tools.
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