The Soft-Start of a Software Developer

In this article I’m going to share with you the recipe that Cheesecake Labs uses to prepare its Cakers, by giving them the special ingredients to bake a Cheesecake using the right temperature – or as it might be said in other companies, how CKL makes the first days of the new employees a good experience and how to get them started at our projects.

At the time this post was written, I had been a Caker for a bit longer than two months. Now, I want to show the experience of becoming one from the hiring process until the first great achievement, which in my case, was an app release at the Store.

Getting the Ingredients

Just by visiting Cheesecake’s website or its social network profiles you can get an idea of how it’s like to work here. At first sight it seems to be surreal, like Silicon Valley companies or a startup that cares about what’s better for the employee. When you apply and come for the first interview, you do your very first office tour and start to realize that the things you saw were not just marketing, they are all real! And that totally maximizes your desire of becoming a Caker.

When the (so long awaited) first day comes, the anxiety explodes and you count the minutes to begin your journey. When you get there, the first thing you have to do is to get around, talk to some people and get to know the place in all its details, discovering out how the company works. If you’re not used to this kind of company culture you may think it will take some time for you to get used to it, but in no more than a couple of weeks you might already start to consider Cheesecake Labs your second home.

Preheating the Oven

In the first week you will be already interacting with other members of the project team that you will be allocated and preparing yourself to start coding! In my scenario, the project used a language and architecture that were completely new to me – Kotlin with VIPER, you can read more about accessing this blogpost – so it was a week of learning and simple implementations, but even so I was already contributing to the project. At this point Cheesecake’s culture helped me a lot too, because every time I had questions – and Google couldn’t help me – there was a Caker willing to save me.

With the beginning of the project’s development, started the project meetings, joining initially only the daily meetings, where only the local team members are in, going to follow-up meetings with the client, until talking directly with the client by chat or video calls.

In the second week my implementations were already being incorporated into the beta releases sent to the client. At the beginning of the second month I started to elaborate and send some beta releases. And after two months, when the app was sent to the Play Store, me and the project’s manager did the process to send the release version. Step by step I was assuming the focal point of Android development, while my coworker started to take the management role of a new project. In less than three months I was already one of the gears responsible to maintain the full system in harmony.

Yes, almost at light speed, don’t you think? But this was only possible thanks to the Cakers that gave me all the support and feedback that I needed to give my best every day.

Serving the Cake

The small details, like offering a coffee along with a good relaxed chat, can make a great difference when discovering this new world. The Cheesecake’s culture and the Cakers are the main factors that allow all of this to happen so easily and fast, responsible for providing a workplace extremely enjoyable, bringing new challenges and, at the same time, supporting you to beat them, promoting the professional and personal growth. Each day becomes clearer the ocean of opportunities and knowledge that I have ahead, and that gives me even more breath to say: I am a CAKER.