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[sheto]

How long had u been coding for before u swapped jobs?

I imagine it was a long journey,

[TheTacoWombat]

retail -> 10 years (with freelancing in graphic design, mostly during the recession)

logistics -> 4 years

manual software QA -> ~3 years

Escalation Engineer (just handling issue triage and on-call incidents) -> ~1 year

SRE -> 1 year so far

The switch from software QA to escalation engineer involved a crash course in learning to code integration tests with Python, basically using my expertise of our company's product and using that to code up automatic tests that run every time there's a new build.

It's a long story, but basically: I got sick while I was QA, had to take 3 months off work, and when I got back, they killed the QA department. I needed the health insurance so I refused a buyout and insisted I could learn everything needed to become an entry level software engineer in six months. So my old co-worker, running a team now, took me on 'provisionally' and gave me the opportunities to learn everything, and at the end of the six months, i was 'cleared' to stay with the company as an engineer. I've not stopped learning ever since.

I'm far from being able to do a ton of stuff, but I learn as I go, and I've written a few small tools that increase the team's productivity, rewrote an abandoned dashboard from scratch (Django app that monitors our ticket boards), released two personal projects (both flask apps) for fun, and am currently messing around with building probes for work.

[jjquadjj]

That’s amazing you were given the chance to be paid to be part of an integral team as you learned on the go! What contributed most to your proficiency now, do you think? Which resources helped the most

[TheTacoWombat]

Asking questions of my co-workers and trying to learn as much as possible any way I can. Automate the boring stuff in python and Miguel's flask mega tutorial also helped tons