my first 2 months as a full-time software engineer

october 2026

some reflections on the work and experiences i've gained after my first two months as a software engineer in northern virginia. side note that i've been an intern at this company for two years prior to starting full-time work.

projects

i got put on a new project when i started work again at the end of this summer. apparently the project had only been acquired for the company the friday before the monday i started. the project itself seems to be pretty long-standing within the defense and intelligence community, and seems to be driven by very rapid iteration and testing cycles.

for the first full testing event that involved multiple parties, we traveled to georgia in september for a week in september. it was my first work trip, and the benefits were definitely super nice. big hotel room, free hotel starbucks and nice gym, trying out new cuisines every day for dinner, and going grocery shopping on a reimbursable budget. i also got to see a lot of the tech setup and integration for the project, which was very cool.

technologies

with the growing integration of ai tools into our everyday workflows, i've been able to work on tasks across various project stacks in a short period of time. the project is responsible for multiple applications that are built on pretty different stacks, and things like gemini and codex have been helpful in grasping the workings of their large codebases.

most of what i've worked on so far has been in data engineering, building a ETL pipeline for geospatial data that plugs into one of the company's products. that work has involved both new and old technologies for me - clickhouse, minio, rustfs, fastapi, etc. i started pivoting towards one of the other products towards the end of this week, which involves a lot of c++ and qml.

reflections

it's been fun to come back to the company as a full-time engineer and see how things have changed from being an intern. the office still has banger coffee, food, and drinks every day, and older engineers are always nice and willing to share their knowledge. i feel lucky to be put on this fast-paced project and to have the opportunity to experience a lot of the iteration and discussions that go into creating a real-world product. the pace of software engineering seems to have increased noticeably, even in the short two years since i've gained a glimpse into the industry, and i'm excited to see what the rest of 2026 brings.

inspired by this post: https://spin.atomicobject.com/8-years-software-consultant/