American Express Feb 2018 - Jul 2018

Summary:

U-Haul Oct 2015 - Feb 2018

Initial Goal:

After moving from Los Angeles to Phoenix I noticed sustaining myself on a steady flow of simple small-scale freelance projects would not be an option, and the cities language of choice was C#, which I had never used before. I took a job at U-Haul as a manual QA tester with the intention of learning C# to acclimate to the Phoenix development scene.

Adding Value:

U-Haul had no automated tests at the time, I didn't see myself as a "manual tester", I didn't care what my title was, I was hired to test software. So I immediately began working on a testing framework at home that would allow us to quickly write UI tests at scale for our web applications. I would use what I made at home to be more effective at work, I saw a hole in the companies development cycle and I took on the task of filling it.

Pivoting Roles:

After a short time, the head of my department took notice and an Automation team was created, I was made the lead and tasked with bootstrapping a process for testing all of our applications. The team started with me and one other and has now grown to six people. My free time became consumed with learning how to build large frameworks and how to train people with no coding skills to be productive as fast as possible. Watching conferences and reading programming books became my second job. I would read the code for projects like Ruby on Rails and JQuery to learn about library and API design. I became obsessed with making composable software.

JavaScript Development:

After training my team-mates on writing tests and maintaining the framework I began work on a test hub capable of scheduling tests, running them on demand, and a dashboard for viewing the results. This application is built as a restful API built using Node and a React client. This has been my responsibility full time for the last year.

This project has allowed me to learn JavaScript in depth along with:

•   React, flux, and Redux.
•   Node.js, Express, and MongoDB.
•   Social Authentication and JWT.
•   Analytics, reporting, and graphing with libraries like D3, Victory.
  
•   Background jobs.
  
•   Parallelism.
  
•   Database management.
  
•   Managing server state in a reliable way.
•   Web-sockets and the real-time web
•   And much more.
  

The application built for running tests is complete with user permissions, admin roles,  the ability to run and watch tests using the NoVNC library. I have learned a lot grown as a developer because of this project. If I did not know something I would go home and learn it, then implement that portion at work when I was confident I could. I knew that working on my skills at home is worth it for both U-Haul and myself. This has lead to an amazing career trajectory within the company and has opened doors that many development teams here do not have the privilege of exploring.

Review:

I ended up pivoting pretty far from my initial vision of how this job would play out. I still hardly know C#, and instead have become a JavaScript developer. Through determination and a lot of hard work, much of which was done off the clock I was able to create an entirely new team at U-Haul and work with the technologies I enjoy and see a great future in. I have learned that doors open and rewards come for those willing to put in the work, go the extra mile and get things done.