Introduction

Thursday, March 4, 2021. This is the date that I completed and handover the first project for my job, a community blog / event listing website, that I built for my company's client, Ko-Latih (a newly established koperasi / co-operative).

I was given this project in the first month of joining the company. I did not have any prior experience with web design and I only came in with some knowledge of frontend development.

I had no one supervising me or telling me what to do in the company. So, I have to take the initiative to meetup with the members of the co-operatives to discuss the features and the design of the website.

At the time, I didn't know what I was doing. Nevertheless, I like the opportunity that I gotten from this role, and in this article, I will walk through what I had worked on, and what I've learned from the experience, all within the past year (2021).

What I've Worked On

My First Project 🐣 (November 2020 - March 2021)

Before diving into the first project I worked on, I'll give a quick overview of GEM Consultancy Sdn Bhd, the company that I work for: we are a training provider in Sarawak, Malaysia providing corporate training. Our main offering is TTT (Train-the-trainer) training, a 5-days certification training course designed to help trainers improve their skills in training other people and get certified as a trainer.

As a result of the TTT training, my company wanted to build a community centered around certified trainers who completed their course. This community would be a place where poeple can share their experiences and learn from each other.

Thus, one of graduate of the TTT training course initiated Ko-Latih, a koperasi / co-operative for certified trainers who completed the TTT training course under my company.

Long story short, in this project I was exposed to a lot of new things:

• Only the decision maker's opinion matter: During a meeting, where I met and discuss the features for the website with the Ko-Latih's members, everyone had a different opinions of how the website should be design and what functionalities should be included. In the end, I had a discussion with one of my colleague and I decided to give the most weight to the requirement given by the president of Ko-Latih.
• Learning web design
• Getting stuck on a feature for weeks
• Handing over website to a client with documentation
• etc

While I was the only person working on the site, I always updated my progress with the Ko-Latih's members and the president of Ko-Latih whenever a feature was completed.

Moving onto an internal project (Pinnacles) 📈 (February 2021 - Current)

While in the process of completing and handing over my first project, I was assigned another project to start. This project was poorly defined in the beginning, the requirements and scope were constantly changing. Marketing and leadership had different opinions on what should be implemented. Thus, there was a lot of features and design rewrite. Example includes rewriting a monthly subscription payment feature to an invoicing payment feature.

Below are some things I had implemented in the product:

• Landing Page
• Blog, Course Page, all the marketing pages....
• Log in / Sign up Authentication portal
• Personal user dashboard and Admin Dashboard
• Lots of forms for HR Filling
• Transactional emails (invoices, receipt, sign-up / sign-out, booking confirmation, etc)
• Integration with Stripe API to for invoicing participants.
• SEO and Google Analytic
• Hosting and deployment

There was a lot technology that I had to learn in this project and I spent lot of times researching how to build functionalities that were required.

It's February 2022 right now, and the product is almost ready to be used by the company after I have train the admins on the user interface of the web applicatiom.

Conclusion

I am proud that I have went from not knowing web design and only having basic knowledge in frontend and backend development to being able to start 2 web projects from scratch all the way to completion.

I've also become pretty invested in the JavaScript ecosystem which I have been using for the past year, and look forward to deepening my knowledge in this area as I continue my career.

Goodbye. 👋

Thanks for reading my blog post till the end.😊 I'd love some feedback about my writing if you have any.