I originally started writing this towards the end of 2024 – and then re-wrote it in 2025, never finished it and here we are definitely going to post about where I am as a software engineer in 2026.
Two things I’m not going to touch on much here.
- How my role has changed due to AI. Yes, I’m ignoring the elephant in the room, but only because it is a post in itself which I will start writing this year and finish writing in 2028 when AI reads my thoughts and writes it for me.
- Details of what I’m working on professionally – let’s just call it an internal merchandising tool.
Back in 2024 I posted about wanting a role which developed me as a software engineer, as I was doing the same thing too much (building React components, etc).
Curiously enough, a month or two later, one was offered to me, still within M&S.
At first it was mostly just building more React components and new pages in NextJS – architectural decisions had mostly been made by this point, and there was a deadline to meet. So we just cracked on.
But not long after the MVP was released, the two staff engineers left, and I stepped up to lead the project from an engineering side – which gave me opportunity to expand my skillset.
Even before that though, I was deliberating on API specs with the back-end team, adjusting ci pipelines, etc.
Maturing A Product
I spent some time studying for the AZ-900 exam, Azure Fundamentals – I’ve had limited scope to use it so far, but hopefully sufficient understanding for initiating/managing future projects on the cloud.
Some of the more important improvements to our developer experience came from my research into how to speed our pipelines up, and I cut the total build by around 25% – this was before the Opus 4.5 model so I actually had to research this myself, though one assumes I could just ask AI to improve the build time now, and bang, done.
Also doing things like migrating our observability to a new platform, and significantly improving what we were tracking, automated accessibility checking, yadda yadda – I don’t need to write any more really as I’m not trying to get a promotion out of writing a blog.
Mostly I write this as a journal anyway so I can see my progress, possibly only I ever read this – but anyone, of course, could.
On personal projects, I try to keep to reasonably high ci standards, but I am more focusing on projects that have some back-end involvement, as my scope for back-end work with my employer is limited as the Java ecosystem is totally different, and I’m not too fussed about learning it when my passion is around excellent user experiences.
That said I did vibe code my way around adding pagination to an endpoint…it didn’t get too many review comments.
Anyway, I’ve created my own API for pubs – it’s a bit lacking in data at the moment, and I haven’t quite finished it – there is a Vercel-hosted demo site here, it more or less works – I need to find a free day one weekend to try and finish it. Or me and Claude do, anyway.
I feel like I’m a fully-furnished senior front-end engineer nowadays, able to plan, build and maintain a fully-functioning application from start to end – I don’t feel like I’m missing any gaps any more, at least when it comes to front-end.
Though this touches on what I intend to speak about in my AI changed my job post, I can see a future where I’m doing a full-stack product engineer role, so being a relative expert in front-end is possibly only going to be a third of the job in future, now we all have super-charged assistants, or perhaps are now assistants to our AI overlords.
For the rest of this year, I feel like my focus will be on getting some more back-end exposure (probably just on personal projects) and also improving knowledge of the overall system design of how applications work.