Tom Materne / forbit

After finishing Uni, and partaking in RSP, I managed to get a graduate role as an SDE 1 at Amazon in Brisbane. This was an amazing opportunity that would build on my previous experience in freight & logistics, as the team in Brisbane is focused on building software for Amazon's grocery experience. Our team of 12 mostly focuses on back-end software, primarily written in Java& other JVM languages, with some of our front-end tooling in React + typescript. The opportunity to work on classical distributed systems property at a scale that actually makes sense was one of the most exciting things about this role

After my third semester of Uni, and coming out of my first successful tech job, I applied to many junior positions in my city. I had learnt enough JavaScript & Java that I thought I could land a part-time job over the semester break, and gain some work experience as well. Eventually, I managed to get a job for a local company, which has pretty large operations but a relatively small software team. This job required me to learn PHP - a language that I had never looked at, within 2 weeks. My skills & knowledge were put to the test, but I managed to pick it up in the 2 weeks from the interview and when I started working, and within my first week I had already pushed some code to the production servers. It was quite interesting moving from web-dev with React & NextJS to just using vanilla PHP and JavaScript, no frameworks. This meant we basically had our own hand-rolled solutions for everything.

After my first year of Uni, I applied for many summer contract jobs, and managed to secure a gig for a magazine company. I was tasked with preparing their existing subscribers database - which was just a couple documents in an excel file, that they emailed around to each other, for upgrading into an SQL database. I had learnt about SQL databases in school, and had done some basic experimenting around within my web development learning, so I felt confident that I could do this. I was also handed the responsiblity of filling in missing data, obtaining it from multiple internal sources (phonebooks & other excel spreadsheets) and combining them all into one database.

While at school, I excelled at Badminton, and was offered to coach the school team after I had finished. This job was great fun, and I really developed as a leader during this time. I was in charge of 8 different teams of wonderful badminton players, and we played at the top level for our local city. Coaching Badminton was such a fun job, and was a nice change of pace compared to the high-stress environment McDonald's.

During school and for my first couple years in University, I worked at McDonald's. I enjoyed the high-pace environment, and the community at McDonald's, I managed to build life-long friendships with my co-workers. I attained the role of Crew Trainer, and did some professional development with the McDonald's office to improve my coaching ability, which went hand-in-hand with my other job after school, Badminton Coach.