You are doing a great job. I worked with research institutes from Australasia, and now am working with others from Europe. There are heaps of people from different backgrounds like yours, geography, physics, engineering, etc., that inherit or start coding projects.
And people with different ages too. I've seen people fresh off university learning about tests, and also researchers with a great reputation and lots of papers written that were getting the hang of what were unit tests, CI, a server and a client, and other concepts that are so common to people in IT.
Nothing wrong with that. Keep up the good work, and keep slowly improving the code. I hope you have somebody else to work with you on this task, and do some code review or discuss when you need to work on something new, or perhaps a group at your company/work that has some Research Software Engineers.
Most RSE's I know are familiar at working with people from different backgrounds to slowly improve projects without blocking/stalling research, simulations, and publication. Thank you!
