Absolunet | Vuse.com

Valtech_Absolunet is the experience that gave me a lot of confidence as a developer. Before, I never really had the occasion to compare myself to other developers, not because I wanted to know if I was better, but only to know if I was legitimate to have the luck of working for such a company and previously getting a position at Paris Airports. The impostor syndrome is something that followed me when I started my career because when you start as a freelancer, it's difficult to gauge yourself as a developer, "ok, I'm handling the tasks, the clients are content, but am I really a good developer?" I am not saying that I am good, but what I want to say is that Absolunet helped me to feel better about my abilities.

What was my routine? I had just arrived in Canada, my new life was beginning, but I was also working for Paris Airports because I had committed, and there was still a significant salary difference that was not negligible. I woke up at 6 am (12 pm in France) to work on my Paris Airports tasks for about 2 hours. At 8 am, I had breakfast and got ready for the 9:15 daily scrum meeting with my Absolunet team for about 15 minutes, discussing what we worked on the day before and what we planned for today. We used Jira and Confluence for our organization. It was the first time I worked with a scrum master and I had some apprehensions about it, was I well-trained to work in agility? And I must admit that I had a false idea and I thought it would be more complicated than that.

Sometimes we organized Grooming meetings to evaluate the tasks for future sprints.

Working on a React.js stack in the frontend with Gatsby (although I prefer Next.js) and Node.js (Koa) allowed me to work on the backend and change a bit from the development I usually practice. Unfortunately, this didn't reconcile me with styled-components. I was happy to share my knowledge on incremental static regeneration of pages that Gatsby was trying to integrate at the time. I felt that I could contribute to the team at this level and I was very happy about it. I will never thank my colleagues enough for letting me work on the backend even though I had been initially recruited for the frontend. I even preferred working on that side because I felt like I was making much more progress.

I had the chance to join the recruitment committee with the aim of refactoring the entry tests. I raised that for me, the entry test was not specific enough for recruiting on React.js, and that the test did not truly reflect the candidates' knowledge of these technologies but was much more focused on basic HTML/CSS and SASS integration. So, I worked with a team of 5 developers to develop a more specific recruitment test, and it was a very good experience.

Unfortunately, I couldn't keep up with two jobs at the same time and at that time I had to reconsider my position and why I came to Canada. I obtained a PVT (Working Holiday Visa) and my biggest wish was to discover Canada. That's why I chose to stop this experience in favor of returning full-time to Paris Airports, which gave me more flexibility (as I was a freelancer) to fully experience these 2 years in Canada (between 2021 and 2023).

I will always be grateful to the Valtech_Absolunet team for trusting me and contributing to my professional development, giving me even more confidence in my abilities.