“There is one bridge between my personal and professional life, and it is a challenge. I started as a hard-core backend developer, and now I am working as a full-stack developer. Without challenge, I probably would not be here now.”
Marija Barjaktarovic
In our latest Tech Forward webinar, listen to our own Marija Barjaktarovic as she takes you on a journey to the world of front-end software development and discusses her challenges and successes.
In this webinar, you will learn more about:
- Why Marija didn’t previously like being a front-end developer
- What obstacles she had to overcome on this journey
- How being a front-end developer helped her master her back-end skills
- Her advice to all engineers willing to step into the unknown
Watch the video.
Marija starts her story by reflecting on her childhood and explaining that she didn’t choose this career path by accident. When she was a little girl, she used to play a lot with her grandma. She took the role of a person working in a bank, and grandma was her client. Today, she is working on a big project related to finance and banking, so things seem to make perfect sense.
“There is one bridge between my personal and professional life, and it is a challenge. I started as a hard-core back-end developer, and now I am working as a full-stack developer. Without challenge, I probably would not be here now.”
But her road to front-end development was not so smooth and sudden. In fact, she used to hate being a front-end developer because she considered it totally different from the backend, like some kind of art, a real rollercoaster with a lot of ups and downs.
“The beginning of every adventure is easy, but then it gets more challenging. I am not sure why it is hard for all back-end developers — you need to change your mindset, to shift it to the mindset of an artist, and this is probably the main problem.”
After the webinar, we had a chat with Marija.
HTEC: What’s the biggest obstacle you had to come across on this journey “into the unknown”?
“It is definitely the fact that I had to shift my mindset from backend to front-end development and use a different approach to solving issues. Besides technical challenges, I had to change the very way of thinking since the backend has an entirely different set of problems. In contrast, the frontend has features that may seem simple at first, but once we start working on the project, we realize that it is not that simple and that we have to consider many more aspects than on the backend.”
HTEC: What advice would you give to engineers who are about to take on a similar challenge?
“You can always choose to stay where you are, or you can choose to get out of your comfort zone. In most cases, it turns out that getting out of your comfort zone was a great idea. But we should definitely say to ourselves: ‘Let’s try something new,’ even though it may be hard at the beginning. And it’s a completely normal thing! We need time to get used to things and learn them to become better at what we do. In the end, we will feel much better. Even if we fail, we will still know that it didn’t work, so we can move on and start a new adventure. I think that by leaving our comfort zone, we can gain much more than we could lose, especially if we want something badly.”
HTEC: Are you planning to “jump into the unknown” again any time soon?
“Big yes! There is a whole range of technologies I would like to learn and so many things to do on my list. Currently, I am pretty much busy working on a project, so I am not sure when I am about to start a new adventure, but it sure is one of my priorities.”
HTEC: What do you think is the best part of being a woman in the software industry?
“I must say that men have always surrounded me throughout my education and career, and there is a general misconception that men can do more. But I believe that women can also make amazing progress, so I am kind of driven by an ambition to give my maximum potential so that we can build amazing things together, no matter whether we are men or women.”
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