Behind The Journey: Laurence Rega - Full Stack Engineer

Welcome to Behind the Journey, where we take an in-depth look into the lives of GetYourGuide employees. Each feature explores an individual's work and personal interests, offering insight into their motivations and what drives them.

This week, we're chatting with Laurence Rega, a Full Stack Engineer at GetYourGuide. Laurence tells us about her time at GetYourGuide – the challenges she faced, the successes she achieved, and her ambitions going forward. She also shares some unforgettable memories she made with her teammates.

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Full-stack engineering at GetYourGuide

I joined GetYourGuide as an Associate Full Stack Engineer in 2021. It was my first working experience in the field, and starting at GetYourGuide was one of my goals.

When I joined, I still had a lot to learn about what it meant to be a full-stack engineer in the working environment instead of working on personal projects while studying or treating them as a hobby. Things were reasonably straightforward, however.

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Stepping out of the associate role

I am proud of the things I have achieved since I joined. The first milestone I achieved was stepping out of the associate role. 

Another one was to start owning the development of our company’s design system to maximize consistency between our apps and website and offer the best experience possible to our users.

It is still a work in progress, but we have come a long way thanks to a tight collaboration between the product, engineering, and design teams.

Trusting myself to own a big-scale project

So far, the biggest challenge I have encountered is to start trusting myself as a mid-level full stack engineer and my ability to own a big-scale project, such as our design system or, more recently, Server Driven UI for our website. Imposter syndrome is, in any field, a reality.

On top of learning about tools and processes, I had to learn about panic management and sometimes feeling that the earth would stop spinning because of an incident your code triggered on the website.

Luckily, the environment of trust here makes that feeling go away, and we can really count on each other. 

Building strong relationships and making memories

I joined during COVID, and after a long period of working from home, the moments we were able to create as a team together were important to me. There are so many of them that it is hard to pinpoint one in particular! If I had to choose one, I would say the company party we had last spring, gathering people from all around the world in our Berlin office.

We got to meet colleagues with whom we had been working for a while but never got a chance to meet face to face. It wasn’t always easy to translate zoom videos into actual people, but it quickly became a “Where is Wally '' kind of evening for some team-members and myself. 

Spoiler alert: we found every Wally we were looking for!