My story

I am Atabekov Farrukh, software engineer from a small province in Uzbekistan and currently living in South Korea. In this post, I want to tell about my very ordinary story of becoming an engineer.

I remember around the end of middle school, I was into learning foreign languages. I learnt English well and realized that this language is where most of the today’s information lives and thrives in.

I got into high school designated for science subjects and even there, I had a reputation for being a fluent English speaker. The amount of information I could absorb in English was massive and the limitation of resources in my own language would stimulate the necessity to use a foreign language even more.

During that time, I remember reading the biography of Steve Jobs and how he founded Apple with his friend in his garage. Even though he was known being this egocentric CEO of Apple, the story of how he was kicked out of the very first company he started and starting another company, later to be bought by Apple to bring its founder back had a huge impact on me. He did not only come back to Apple but saved it from the verge of bankruptcy, making it one of the best brands of early 2000’s. I used to translate and read his 2005 Stanford Commencement address over and over. He might not have the best personality or management skills out there but he obviously had a great entrepreneurial spirit and a taste for top notch quality.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

-- Steve Jobs

This incident led to find out more about other top companies and how they were started. Therefore, soon enough I had gone through the biographies of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, etc. Most of those people and the companies they started had one connection that they were all tech related. I remember going through the Forbes list of the richest people and the majority of those people had their wealth generated from tech related companies they founded.

There needed to be a reason for the significant amount of today's wealth landing on tech-related companies. It become clear to me that the reason behind was those companies have a capability to influence the lives of billions of people around the world without the need for much resources. The calibre of the work in some of those companies was influential as well as resource-efficient.

It became the leading factor for me to get started in computer science. It might not be the best reason since not all of those people mentioned above were developers themselves but I was sure that in the upcoming years, the capacity of information to influence people's lives could end up growing even more.

I started my university with Business Administration and had a double major of Computer Science starting in the third semester. I really enjoyed courses such as C, C++, Data Structures and Algorithms and the rest of the courses was quite disappointing and we as students relied mostly on online courses from US schools and YouTube to learn those subjects. The computer science department in English track was new and that might have played a role in low quality of courses.

I had my first internship in a Korean startup. I was given a task of building a full scale ERP system for camera rental services of the company. I was able to build up a small Django website to meet the requirements in some sense but the lack of experience together with the highly technical nature of the project made the result not as good as expected. Around that time, Covid-19 pandemic started in Korea and when time came, company downsized and my internship time was over as well.

This was one of the important jobs in my career because it made me realize that when you work in IT, it is not about how many languages you know or are familiar with but rather which language you know best and can professionally work with. During my university years, I had ignored JavaScript as a small scope language and did not spend any time learning it. However, during the development of ERP system, I saw how crucial role has JavaScript gained in web development. Realizing that, I spent the next couple months studying JavaScript ecosystem well and started building projects with it.

You do not have to learn 3-4 languages to get started as a developer. All you need is a single programming language that you know well.

I graduated in summer 2020 and joined a Korean start up called Coconut Silo as a mobile developer. I worked on a medical mobile application targeted for Korean market and our team developed this application and made ready to launch within 4 months. The team was really professional and I learnt most of my React Native knowledge working in this company. I was solely responsible for the React Native side of the application and integrated Korean messanger based integrations. I decided to leave Coconut Silo in December 2020.

I joined another Korean startup called WCoding that has an IT academy as well as consulting agency. They stand out from the rest of the Korean startups with their mostly international staff and English based IT courses. I had the honor of learning a lot about full stack and product development from a senior developer of more 20 years of experience. The friendly environment and a chance to work on different projects was a great aspect of being a developer there. I think this company gave me a chance to transition from a front end to backend developer where I learnt about deployment management, CI / CD pipelines, Linux environments and testing production applications. I worked there for a year and half which is the longest time I have worked in a company so far.

Recently, I have been working as an independent contractor at Toptal. I also frequently participate on coding challenges and Hackathons. One of which led me to my current contract with Toptal.

Good luck in your journey as well ~ !