4 Years of Work with TORO

After 4 long years, I finally decided to leave the place that taught me everything I know 🎓😭. 

I've been fighting with myself a little if I should write about this until I realized that this is what blogs are about 🙄. So here's a summarised (but still very long) account of the best 4 years of my life.

Early bird 🐣

I'm always the earliest person in the office! I have an almost clean record (except for that one time I asked my workmate to pick me up going to work and he arrived late 🙄). I really loved the few minutes of quiet that I get before the others arrive.

I was also working with my aunt! It was great! Which also means I get a free ride every day because we live in the same subdivision 🤑. She was always punctual too and when she left I didn't want to change that.

My punctuality got worse when AJ and I met. We started arriving more than an hour everyday to work! By accident! Until eventually it became the norm. Thanks to our mini competition on who will arrive first in our meeting place 🏆

I wanted to add this here because in my next company, there's shifting and I won't have my few minutes of quiet anymore.

Socials 

I still believe that the smartest people I know I met here! 🤓🤓🤓

Peasants

I met friends I will treasure for a long time, also including some I have outgrown throughout the years. The only reason we became a group was the fact that we started work at the same time. And that's it.

We started calling our group peasants because we always talk about how rich we acted during our OJT (with 150PHP a day of allowance) but now we can't even buy what we want 🤷🏽‍♀️

This girl is getting married next month! This photo was taken when we were both in a relationship that at the time we both thought would last. Crazy how time changes things ⏱

There was a time we were obsessed with taking photos all around Bertaphil just to post in our Instagram accounts. Feels like we're too old for that now 👵🏼.

Then there was one time right before Paramore's concert in Manila that we spent our morning for a fake happy chalk drawing. We setup a projector and copied the content.

I may have had a breakdown when they removed this 1 year after to replace with a birthday surprise decors for our CEO.

For awhile now (Im guessing 2 years) , it's just 3 of us peasants left. We still eat lunch together every day. We ended up getting used to eating 1 table apart when we transferred to the new office. 😂

These two requested we have a separate day for my last day which was totally fine with me 🐽

After Peasants

A new set of friendship was also born after most of my peasants left. A new boyfriend as well.

We usually just eat (samgyupsal), play jengga and talk about the latest Netflix shows.

Lowkey still hoping for a future where we are all reunited in one company 💡

Forever my favorite photo

Last Day Hangouts

The most consistent thing all throughout was me planning where we go for someone's last day at TORO. And then when it was my turn I didn't know what to do 😂. 

 

This is where we make promises that we will always keep in touch which doesn't really happen all of the time 😅.

We spent mine eating chickens! 🍗

and do nothing but chill until it was midnight ⛱.

TORO events

My only chance left to dress up! We had year end parties, company outings, company anniversaries, frequent team building and even an annual TORO Gives Back event where we visit our chosen charity.

I managed to miss my last Year End Party because it was also the day of my flight back to the Philippines 👻. Still kinda salty about it.

In 2018 our bosses decided to change our monthly pizza to a monthly (or was it quarterly) event for team building. It was a great decision. We played laser tag and tried escape rooms (no team got out in time). There was one time we ran around inside a bubble. It was probably not the most hygienic thing.

We also set up some time for frisbee! I never played but I was almost always present to take photos. 

Committee 2017

This I can pile up in the list of things I will never do again.

I really enjoyed planning for events, it was just that people are really hard to impress. Specially when you have to juggle a full time work while doing it. The expectations are always high even though the budget and time is limited.

Things I learned:

• Never travel with a lot of people
  • Or make it a luxury type if needed
• Travel agencies are the worst
• People complain a lot and expect way too much
• People think that committees are not supposed to enjoy the events 🧐

Frontend Development

First, OJT

When I had my OJT, it was only as simple as using jQuery. No Git. No NPM. No Gulp. No collaboration. It was a little bit farther away from the actual work we've had so there was a bit of a shock there.

What made my OJT more memorable was my college besties. We may have overused Hipchat and new (strict) rules were set for the OJTs when we left. It was fun to experience work with them and I hope it was the case once we graduated 😢. 

We actually saved up our TORO allowance for a Palawan trip. My first ✈️ travel with friends.

Team

TORO FE 2017

TORO FE 2018

TORO FE 2019

After meeting multiple IT students in hackathons I have made my generalization and;

• Devs (FE and BE) are quiet. We won't eat our lunch specially if we are not done with the work
• SysAds are the opposite. They are the first to line up at the first sight of pizza.

So work life for me is very quiet. I seat next to my lead for years but we don't really talk to each other. We seat next to each other but we still preferred chat 😅. It was crazy how we are still very close despite our silence.

Our curated stations.

This kind of bond is also the same with the new team mates that joined our team! But trust me, we are all friends 🖖🏼.

IT Elite | Hackathon 

Spent so much time facilitating hackathons and it was where I learned to talk to people better. The day ends with us checking every contestant's code and generate feedback from that. Tell them what not to do, suggest solutions/alternatives, introduce best practices, converse like it's a normal work day with team mates. 

There was also a time where we went to various schools around region 3 for a hackathon (it inspired this travel blog post). There were pizza.

And donuts 🐽.

There was one time where it was way too hot in the venue (Air conditioning's not turned on) and every student flocked our game. It was a challenge. I will never forget it.

I love how years after some of them who eventually end up employed as well mention stuff I taught them when they joined a hackathon because 1.) they remember me and 2.) awww I made an impact 😭😭. I always say that if I want to give back to the community, what I should do is teach but I know I'm not ready for that responsibility yet. So this is enough for now. 

This was an experience I will forever be grateful for!  

FE OJT Supervisor

I was the OJT supervisor for the longest time although I admit that I never fulfilled that 100% because

• How do you teach what you don't know? (imposter syndrome)
• I was always focused on my own dev tasks
  • I never run out of dev tasks 👻

What I learned is it's hard to find the best out there! And at the end of the day I didn't care about the output, what's more of a concern to me is if the student was too boastful and aggressive to be teachable (which always shows in their outputs). We don't want to work with people like that.

FE work

I started at the bottom. My first responsibility was maintaining legacy code which I hope I never get to work with again. Basically all I do is tweak the UI of a working ecommerce site.

It was a big struggle on how I managed to get into working on our main (AngularJS) projects. Now there's more logic and data manipulation and dynamic interactions than I have ever expected. It's like a different world. On my first pull request (when my only background with AngularJS was creating a search feature) I may or may not have edited a package's code 🙅🏼‍♀️🙅🏻‍♂️. And I may or may not spent way too much time fixing it 😂. It was a disaster. 

To this day, I still find the term "frontend development" confusing, I could talk about it all day! Took me longer to start applying for a new work because I thought I will never find something like my type of frontend development here in Pampanga.

TLK 

The teasing started when it was just only me and my TL left on our team. It got worse because when we have a new team member, they call me TLK (team lead Kweh) too. And after more than a year, it did happen.

From making way too many mistakes at first to ending up leading the team years after, definitely a highlight! I never saw it coming. 

I love it. I hate it. It was a different environment. Here are my thoughts.

Branding

I basically found my branding in TORO 🐣🐤🐥. Pushing through this blog without a logo was a hard decision to make. As it turns out there's more to a brand than a logo. It can be as simple as a color, and it can be a crazy journey from there. I'm glad I took my time for that.

Custom Hipchat emoticons named after me (gweh | kweh)

Yuli or any little girl with short hair

There's something about any little girl that people at the office associate to be me. It was cute and I took part in it 😇. This probably started when my seat mates noticed and made fun of me because my feet don't touch the floor when I sit in my chair.  As it turns out this one little girl we used for some of the stickers was just one girl, and our office mate knew who she is! She's Yuli, a korean baby girl with a huge following on Instagram. Once we were introduced, we added more custom stickers of her photos in Hipchat named after me. 

I bet you already saw her photos circulating around social media. She's hilarious!

Kweh

Everyone who follows me in Instagram (and not just run through my IG stories) knows Kweh. It (She? I?) wouldn't be here today without my team lead.

Backstory: My TL and I only became close when all our other team mates resigned and it was just the two of us left. And then we had a conference in Singapore, the event that formed our friendship. While in SG he started calling me Kweh which I thought didn't mean a thing 🤷🏽‍♀️. I'm so used to having multiple nicknames nothing about this is new.

When we came back to work my TL added custom emoji's for Kweh with pictures of a chick (or little duck it's still a discussion) which I thought was only because I like yellow. As it turns out it was a character in a game (a mode of transportation 🚙) named chocobo that says kweh. This I found out a few months later.

On my birthday one month after the conference, a chick (or duckling) stuff toy was waiting for me in my station. 🐣

My favorite part is how everyone loved Kweh too. Protected her (it?) at all cost. 💛

Gave out Kweh and Yuli (cheap quality) stickers on my last day! During my last week I was suddenly thinking about how I will be forgotten just like everyone else who left and then I thought of this. Everything was rush I was just glad the idea pushed through.

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If I didn't write this post, I never would've realised how much growth there was in me in 4 years. It turned out longer than expected. I had so much to say. This would probably appear boring to strangers (okay even friends) but I love it. 💛

Here's to wherever the things I learned from TORO takes me. I'm ready! 🍻