My first steps

I was pretty handy on setting up a website in PHP. The company liked this because for some reason they wouldn’t want to invest time and effort to use a framework. Back in the day the frameworks were just a fistful and some were really complicated, like Zend Framework or Symfony. Nowadays the developer experience is way better.

The curious choice of not using a framework allowed me to have the experience to build the tools myself, this was not optimal in my opinion for the company but really optimal for me, especially since I was in my early developer days. Having to build my own tools made me dig deep into the different situations I was bumping into and making “my own framework” while being backed up with the extra time that this was taking. I still won’t understand the reason, but I’m grateful nonetheless.

Lights, camera, Hoyts!

Another enriching experience was being part of the development for multiple cinema websites. You can still see the similarities between them, like Cinemark Hoyts in Buenos Aires Argentina, CCA Cinemacenter and Paseo Aldrey Cines in a near tourist city.

I was also part of what it could be called a “Cinema Hub” site, since you can browse and purchase tickets for most of the different cinemas in the city, called MiBoleteria. I’m not particularly proud of how the site turned out, since I wasn’t part of the core work for the site, mostly my work was to fix some errors caused by the chosen implementation and some details like the seat selector. The fact that the site was practically untouched since I was part of the development practically twelve years ago amazes me.

Offboarding

After five years of working in the company, a friend of mine notified me about big company that was recruiting engineers at the time and I thought it was my time to go to find new horizons.