Man, Oct 2015 Pisces, huh? That’s a blast from the past, trying to dig up those memories. Someone asked me the other day, “How was your career back then?” and it really made me stop and think. It’s funny how you can live through something and then years later, you barely remember the specifics, just a feeling.
Back then, I was still pretty deep in the grind, pushing through long hours. I remember I had just wrapped up a major project that had taken a solid six months of my life. We were building this new online platform, totally revamping an old clunker. I mean, it was ancient, like something from the early 2000s, barely holding together with duct tape and prayers. My part involved basically tearing down the existing front-end and rebuilding it from scratch, trying to make it actually look and feel modern.
I started by really digging into what the users hated about the old system. Sat down with a bunch of folks, watched them click around, listened to them cuss at the screen. Took pages and pages of notes. It was clear as day: slow, ugly, and confusing. So, the first thing I did was map out a completely new user flow. I’d sketch wireframes on whiteboards, sometimes late into the night. My office wall was covered in sticky notes and scribbles. I’d grab anyone walking by, pull them into a quick five-minute demo of a rough mockup, and just watch their faces. Their honest reactions, good or bad, were gold.
Then came the coding part, which was my bread and butter. I picked a new framework – I think it was Angular at the time, still pretty fresh for me – and just dove headfirst. There were so many moments I wanted to pull my hair out. Compatibility issues, weird browser bugs that only showed up on one specific version, trying to wrangle data from the backend team who were themselves wrestling with their own legacy systems. It felt like I was constantly hitting walls. I’d get stuck for hours, sometimes days, just staring at a line of code, trying to figure out why it wasn’t doing what I wanted. I remember more than once just packing up my stuff, going home, and coming back the next morning with a fresh pair of eyes, only to spot the stupidest typo that had been staring me in the face.
By Oct 2015, we were in the final stretch. That’s when the pressure really ramped up. We were testing, testing, testing. Everyone in the office was suddenly a QA tester. My inbox was overflowing with bug reports, some tiny, some major. I’d spend my days fixing, deploying, testing, and then fixing again. It was a constant cycle. I remember pulling all-nighters, fueled by lukewarm coffee and stale pizza. There was one particularly nasty bug involving user profiles that just kept resurfacing no matter what I did. I almost gave up on it, thinking it was some kind of ghost in the machine.
- Got the initial user feedback, raw and unfiltered.
- Sketched out tons of wireframes, made a mess of the whiteboard.
- Picked a new tech stack, jumped into learning.
- Battled endless coding bugs and integration headaches.
- Survived the intense final testing phase.
The launch itself was a blur. We all huddled around, watching the traffic hit the new site, waiting for the complaints to roll in. And they did, of course. Not perfect, never perfect. But fewer than we expected, and mostly minor stuff. The big win was seeing the positive comments, users saying how much faster and cleaner it was. That was a huge relief, honestly, a massive weight off my shoulders. It felt like I had just climbed a really tall mountain and finally got to stand at the top, out of breath but feeling pretty damn good.
What happened after that?
Right after that project finished, things kind of settled for a bit. I took a short vacation, just unplugged completely, which was sorely needed. When I came back, the next few months involved a lot of maintenance and incremental improvements on that platform. It was less about the crazy build-out and more about refining, listening to more user feedback, and slowly adding new features. It wasn’t as intense, but still fulfilling in a different way, seeing something I built actually being used and improved upon.
Looking back, that period around Oct 2015 was a real turning point for me. It was one of those projects where I learned so much, not just technically, but about managing expectations, dealing with pressure, and pushing through when things got tough. It built a lot of confidence in my own ability to take something from zero to launch. It made me realize that even when you’re elbow-deep in a project that feels overwhelming, there’s always a way through, even if it means stepping back for a bit and coming at it from a different angle.
From there, my career started shifting a bit. I started taking on more leadership roles, helping guide junior developers through similar challenges. I found myself sharing those exact stories – of the late nights, the frustrating bugs, the eventual triumph – to reassure them that it’s all part of the process. That messy, frustrating, incredibly rewarding process. So yeah, Oct 2015, it was… a time. A foundational time, I guess you could say.
