Patryk Maron · Lead Engineer in London startup

From Graduate to Bartender to Lead Engineer: Tracing a £100,000 Progression

• Patryk Maron

• London, UK

• Started coding at 16, reskinning Counter-Strike forums in PHP and CSS

• Got his first job in web development before uni, making minimum wage

• Quit to study Computer Science and 3D animation

• Worked in a bar after graduating since he couldn't find a job

• Now makes £100,000/year using React, TypeScript, and Next.js

Behind the scenes

I've known Patryk (TW: @patryk__dev) since 2016. We met in Cornwall, which is where you end up if you take a train from London heading southwest, and get off at the very last stop some 6 hours later. We both had joined Launchpad, a university course that offered to pay us a salary for 12 months, and in the end give us a Master’s degree in Business Entrepreneurship. All we had to do in return was build a successful tech startup. How hard can that be?

I remember Patryk stumbling about nearly blind for an entire week. He had lost his glasses in a dare, during one of our early beach BBQs. I still have the video of him jumping in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean, with his glasses still on.

So Patryk, what's your backstory?

First time I wrote any code whatsoever, I was around 16. That was when I used to play lots of Counter-Strike, so around 2008-9. At some point, I got involved and started producing forums for amateur teams. I remember the first forum I ever wrote was in PHP using a framework called phpBB. I used to download that, reskin it with CSS, and then publish it on an Apache server.

When I was 18, I finished my A levels and got offered a job as a web developer outside London. That was 2012. I didn't go to uni for 1 year. So I joined them and I was using PHP and a little bit of JavaScript. I used to code using a framework called Moodle. It's basically WordPress for schools.

2012 was an interesting time because JavaScript was quite popular with jQuery and AJAX, but really what dominated the web was PHP.

There were no developers in that company. I was the first one ever to be hired. With no experience, I was just in the wild. I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I remember I struggled a lot. I did that for 1 year and then decided to stop web development and get into virtual reality and game development. So I went to uni for 3 years where I did Python, C++, VR stuff, and 3D animation.

Why did you decide to stop web development?

I guess because I wasn’t around other developers. I was by myself. I guess if there was a senior developer next to me showing me what I was meant to do, how web development works, maybe I would become more passionate. Today I get to talk to so many people. I know developers, plus I know where to look for answers. But back then, I was just by myself figuring it out.

Did you learn a lot during those 3 years at university?

No. I didn’t grasp most of it. A lot of it was just meeting the assignments and deadlines. The most I learned was on the job or doing my own stuff. I learned more on that first job before uni even though I had no one next to me.

Actually being a good developer, writing good code. I didn’t get that from uni at all.

But uni did teach me a lot of other things. Working in a team, writing documentation around your code, etc. That's something uni did teach me.

Why did you get back to web development?

After doing 3 years with VR tech, I kind of lost interest in it. I knew the technology wasn't there yet. But web development was in a completely different world. Everything changed. So I wanted to go back into web development. At the same time, I was a little bit lost. I didn't understand how. It's funny because I had work experience. So I was sending out CVs to everything and the only interview offers I was getting back were for Java or C# jobs. Stuff that I never programmed with before.

Looking back now, why was it so hard to get a job?

I was happy, I was comfortable, I wasn't desperate to find a job in my field. I wasn't even preparing for the interviews. That's the thing. At one point I did take it seriously and that's when I found Cornwall.

I did not take my career seriously after uni. I was just working in a bar.

What was in Cornwall?

So I got an offer to join Launchpad, which was basically a university course where you get your master’s degree in entrepreneurship, whilst you're trying to start your own startup with three other founders. They assign a role for you and I would be the programmer in the team basically.

That was a really good change for me because I always was a lone programmer everywhere I went. I had no mentorship, no one that I could talk to about coding. But being in Cornwall, in the cohort, there were quite a few programmers and that rubbed off me and gave me a better view of what I wanted to do with my life.

Others inspired me, I guess.

Did you start looking into stuff by yourself as well? In your own free time?

I started my own projects as well, yeah. Started messing around with it all. Understanding. Diving into the JavaScript world again. Because when I was programming, there was no React. So that was 2012. Then, from 2013 onwards, React took over the web development world. So I kind of started learning everything again, you know?

What made you settle in React versus other frameworks?

There was a lot of magic behind the scenes with Angular. Like everything was pre-done for you and then you would just, you know, write on top of it. That's why I really liked React more. Because it felt more like a library, which I don't think it is anymore. I think React is a big framework, but back then React felt like a library where you could just use it where you wanted and how you wanted. There was no right way to use React.

Angular to me felt too opinionated as a framework.

And with Vue, I settled with React because there was a bigger ecosystem, a bigger community. I just wanted to do what everybody else was doing, playing the safe ball.

Did you finish Launchpad, the masters course?

I never finished the course, no. It was literally like the last mile that I decided to quit. Sometimes you know, you have situations in life that you have to address. And this decision wasn't career orientated to me. I had to help out my family and I was obviously in Cornwall, the other side of England. Essentially I had to quit what I was doing, and I got a job back in London.

How did you get a job so fast? You were barely getting any interviews before

So I prepared my CV, and I sent it out just like I did before. But this time I knew what I was applying for. I was looking at JavaScript jobs specifically. I was not applying to anything else. And I got a bunch of interviews.

I felt comfortable, I knew what I was talking about. I think it was just because I was more involved day to day with programming and the entire world of it. I was in online communities like on Reddit, on Twitter, listening, reading, posting, talking to others. I lived for almost a year in Cornwall with 2 developers in the house.

I was just exposed to it all. It was so much easier.

What about today? Your current job?

Now, after 5 years, I'm a lead engineer at DRPCRD. We match creators with brands. So let's say a brand like Adidas wants to promote new shoes, but they don't want to go for the big celebrities this time. They want to hit a large amount of audiences from mid-range creators, creators who have up to 20,000-30,000 followers. So we match those creators with brands and we make sure that the creators get paid for the job.

We do machine learning. We do lots of AI stuff. And I get to make every decision on the tech stack. I get to build the product exactly how I want to. It feels mine.

Working in a small startup you get to do everything, and each month is different.

What does a typical day look like for you?

Each day starts with a stand-up. We share what we did the day before, what we plan to do today, and if we have any blockers. And then most of the time, I just get on with it by myself. When we build a new feature, we talk about it with the founders. Is this something that the business needs? How this thing should work, what are the benefits of it? To figure it out, we whiteboard a lot.

Once we have figured out what we want to build, we put it on JIRA so I can keep track of what I'm doing. The tickets are not very granular, but that's because it's just me.

We had two contractors work under me to help out with the front-end stuff. I would then break up those tickets into much smaller ones. And we were estimating time on them as well. The goal was to keep them quite small and very specific to what needs to be done.

What's your tech stack?

We're using Next.js as a full-stack framework. And it's hosted on Vercel. So that does all of the CI stuff for us. On the front-end we obviously use React and then Radix UI to get the primitives for our components. Then we style them using Tailwind CSS. It's really fast. And whenever we need to build a more complex component, that's when we actually write code.

On the back-end, we're using server components and then your cloud functions in the API folder. On top of that, we also write some of the back-end in AWS Lambda functions. Because there are some limitations with Vercel functions for certain things. So we use AWS Lambdas like microservices.

What advice do you have for someone who is starting out as a software developer?

Fill up your CV with links to GitHub pages, to your code, to live domains. When you apply for junior jobs you're going to stand out from thousands of people who are applying for the same jobs.

If you don't have experience, just write code. Just do side projects. Just do as many side projects as possible.

Do you have any tips for the interview?

Just don't think of it as an interview. Just write the code they ask you to write, and ask as many questions as possible. They already know that you're technical. They already know that you know how to make a React app or how to make a component. And they know that the interview is stressful. So just try to have a good conversation with the person whilst coding some stuff. And there's no need to rush it. No one is expected to finish the technical test.

Do you think a degree is necessary?

It helps, but I don't think it's necessary. Again, have your side projects. If you have three React apps and they look good, you already proved to me, to everybody that you know how to write React. So you will get that job without a degree.

How do you stay updated on the latest technologies?

I read stuff on Reddit. Subreddits like Experienced Devs, Web Dev, Next.js, and some others. You can find those, they're very popular. Then on Twitter, I'm following a few developers, companies, libraries, etc. Every JavaScript library has a Twitter page. Just follow it. Then, the Twitter algorithm will just pump all of this JavaScript web programming content in your face. So that's where I go for that.

Where are we going as an industry? Do you see any trends?

So for the last 10 years, we've been writing JavaScript and sending it all to the client side. It was much less complex than using Ruby on Rails or Django with Python and writing out this monolith of a server to just get your web page going.

Now we have lots of frameworks that are full stack, that use one language, JavaScript, across front-end and back-end. A lot of these JS frameworks want to render out all the HTML on the server side and send that back to the client. So you send as minimal amount of JS as possible. There are fantastic performance gains if you do it like that.

So it feels like we're moving back to what web development used to be like with PHP. But really, with JavaScript this time. Because before, you had to know multiple languages to have a webpage. Now you just have one.

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That’s it for this week!
If you have any questions for Patryk, reply in the comments below.

See you next time ❤️