First professional role

In 2023 I had my first experience working on a development team. I arrived at the UNSJ Institute of Computer Science still seeing myself as a student. I was still learning, still had doubts and was still looking to improve, but for the first time there was something I was doing that was going to be used outside of my own projects.

The work involved developing interfaces for educational video games. The end users were kids, but most of the time I had no direct contact with them. My connection to those people came through researchers and teachers who knew their needs much better.

That forced me to think differently. I couldn't just ask the user what they wanted or watch how they used the interface. I had to understand the context through other people and make decisions with that information.

It was the first time something I had designed ended up being used by someone else. I didn't see it happen, but I knew it was.

One of the things that stayed with me most from that experience was better understanding the impact of design decisions. Before I mainly saw accessibility as a feature to keep in mind. Working in this context I understood that an interface can either help someone do something or directly prevent them from using a tool.

An accessibility problem isn't just a visual or technical detail. For some people it can be the difference between being able to use something or not. From that point I started paying more attention to decisions that might have gone unnoticed before.

During that time I worked with React and with people who had different profiles from mine: researchers, teachers and other developers. The pace was different from working on personal projects. There were decisions that had to be discussed, changes that had a reason behind them and a context that didn't depend only on my way of working.

It was the first place where programming stopped being just building something because I wanted to. What I was doing had a concrete use and was part of other people's work.