One Year with Revelry: A Recap from a Design Engineer

This month marks my first anniversary as a front end design engineer at Revelry. As I sit back and reflect on the past year, I realize just how much growth I’ve experienced. Prior to Revelry, I was working primarily in web. I was confident in my work and thought I knew it all when it came to HTML and CSS. Boy was I wrong! Within my first week, I was introduced to Ruby, Foundation, GitHub, SASS, Kanban, and terminal commands. Needless to say, I felt a little overwhelmed at first. But this was exactly what I asked for from them… a challenge.

Here’s some of my key take-aways from my year one working with Revelry:

1. The benefits of components

Like I mentioned before, Foundation was a new world to me. A world in which I quickly began to wonder how I went so long without. With just the simple addition of a class and BAM! There’s your component. My mind was so blown that I messaged the last developer I worked with and asked why it was never something I used.

Over the past year, I’ve become pretty acquainted with Foundation. I started to realize the true value of components when Revelry began building our own stack. Initially we pulled in Foundation’s components and base styles. Since then, I have gotten the chance to sit down with the other designer, Laura, and come up with a list of the components that we thought could be built better. This was something I never thought I would be capable of. A year ago I was impressed that all I had to do was add a class to an element and it would be styled. Now I’m able to analyze how it was built and if there was a better way to build it.

It’s been extremely satisfying to be able to contribute to our stack and its constant improvements.

2. The importance of code review

To everyone else, this is probably a no-brainer. But coming from a situation where there wasn’t someone to review your code, you quickly see the benefits of code reviews. Having my code reviewed allowed for the senior level employees to show me better ways to accomplish the task at hand. I quickly learned better practices and better ways to set up/ organize my projects (Shout out to Laura and her awesome organizational tips).

3. The benefits of working with a team like the Rev Squad

I knew I would benefit a lot by working at Revelry, but I didn’t understand how much. Every day I feel like I learn something new from my coworkers. Just the simple act of pairing up with the engineers to accomplish tasks together is something I can learn from. Each time I walk away with a little more understanding of the backend.

The great thing about working with this team, is that I can ask a question and I will get several different, yet valid, approaches to solve my issue. Then, it’s up to me to figure out which approach I think works the best. Everyone wants to push out the best work possible and we can only do that if we work as a team and continue to help and encourage each other to grow.

It’s pretty amazing to be in an environment where everyone wants to learn and expand their skillset. One of the examples that I love about Revelry is that we recently implemented an educational system. Each individual at the company is assigned an educational task that they want to learn about. The educational items are public to the company which allows for any of us to comment on the task. This way we can leave links to resources for that individual to reference. One coworker might know a lot about your particular topic and can point you in a good direction. The group effort that everyone takes to help each other grow is inspiring.

Overall, I couldn’t have asked for a better team to work with. I’ve gotten exactly what I asked for when I interviewed at Revelry. Continual growth, to be challenged everyday, and to be around a team that will push me to be better. This past year has flown by and I’m proud to say I’m part of the Revelry team.