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Meet Charlotte Van der Voort, one of our fullstack developers. Charlotte used to be an intern but is now officially part of our Optis Family. At this point, she has even supervised an intern herself! We took a moment to sit down with her and talk about her first steps at Optis. In this article, you can read all about her journey and why she’s determined to stick around.
Charlotte was studying at KDG when she joined Optis as an intern. Her motivation was to gain experience at a company where they would maintain a personal approach. It was important to her to have a good time so as to find out where her priorities lie, what she’d like about her job, what direction she wanted to go into, and so on. “As an IT student you’re already overwhelmed with offers by recruiters”, she says. She consciously ignored them and told herself she’d revisit them once her internship was over.
That never happened, because she loves it here. According to her, she immediately felt like part of the family and knew she could build her technical expertise further. There was no doubt in her mind once she got the offer to stay so she did!
When she was still at school, she noticed that her classmates were most interested in frontend. She decided to swim against the current and focus on backend. However, at Optis, we always suggest juniors first start fullstack developing so they can test both sides and see what they prefer to specialise in later on. Charlotte now loves developing frontend so much that she would never want to only do backend anymore. There you go!
At Optis, we usually focus on Java-technologies. Charlotte specifically worked with React as a frontend framework and Spring in the backend. She already knew them from her time at school and said it was reassuring to be able to continue working with those frameworks and not be thrown in the unknown. Furthermore, her internship helped shape her image of what working life had to offer so once she started out at Optis, she felt ready to go!
As we said, Charlotte has even supervised an internship herself in the meantime! She quickly got comfortable when she knew she could count on guidance from the entire team. It made for a nice change of pace, she laughs, that as a junior profile she got to advise others and make some decisions on the direction things were going in.
When I look at some of my previously written code, I can clearly see that I’ve improved my skills since I started working here. That’s a great feeling!
The thing Charlotte is most proud of is that she can really see how much she’s grown, by looking at her own code from a year ago. Her learning curve is clearly visible in it, and she likes to go back to previous code sometimes to change it up and make it better. She truly feels like she has a craft now that she’s continuously improving. “I owe it to the Optis Family, though”, she says. “They really support me to develop my skills and revise my code so I can get better at it.”
Charlotte recently went to a React conference in Amsterdam, which motivated her even more to keep on learning and sharing her knowledge with the team. For example, she discovered her interest in TypeScript. As it is something that is required more and more by clients, and as she finds it particularly useful, she is going to be immersing herself in the subject soon. Her new ambition? To become thé go-to person for all things TypeScript at Optis!
October 25, 2022
