[hugocbp]

For me it was when I was able to complete a task that involved a lot of pieces outside of my normal daily flow.

I started as a full stack co-op, but 95% of the work was React. Then we wanted to implement Cypress to do fully E2E testing.

That led my to dig into CI (Circle), Docker, AWS, Redshift, Security Groups, networking. To make the test truly end-to-end, we had to spin up about a dozen containers, several databases, connect to Redshift. All those things were very, very strange to me and very scary.

Luckily nobody wanted to touch those things, so the task was up for grabs and my manager allowed my to try (since I was a co-op, there was not a lot of pressure to deliver other projects).

When I was done I realized that I was not just a JS/React dev, but I could dig in to other complex things and figure them out. My confidence shot through the roof and after that I wanted to work on all big projects available. Ended up switching to a backend team that does completely different tasks from my original one.