What a long and challenging 8 months this has been on my journey to switch my career path and become a full-stack developer. Today, I can officially say that I have deployed my first fully functional website at qualitytools.org! While there have been other websites I’ve developed and deployed from tutorials along the way, Quality Tools is the first I’ve taken from my own concept to completion. After months of education, research, and application, I can honestly say it’s been quite some time since I've felt this proud of myself after seeing this goal come to fruition.
After graduating from Kettering University with a Bachelor’s of Science in Chemical Engineering, I began work full time as a Quality Engineer at a major plastics manufacturing company. After spending numerous years with the company, I worked my way up to the Quality Systems Manager. Working there taught me a lot about what I enjoy doing, but more importantly, what I’m capable of doing. While I enjoy the field of quality and wouldn’t trade my past experiences for anything in the world, I knew it was time for a change in my life. As a member, and ultimately leader, of the Quality Systems department, the time I spent developing and implementing programs to improve our processes and simply other’s work was by far the most enjoyable for me. It was because of this that I realized my true calling in life and devoted my time to becoming a programmer.
I started with object-oriented programming (OOP) through Java, where I learned everything from defining variables to developing multi-threaded applications with networking, databases, and a graphical user interface. From there, I continued forward with my dream of becoming a full-stack developer and began my education on web development. I started off by learning the basics on HTML and CSS, and then took the deep dive into JavaScript where I learned how to develop beautiful websites filled with wonderful animations and tools for user interaction. Through this learning, I developed and deployed my very first, full-fledged website, called YelpCamp. Although this technically was the first website I deployed, it was not based on my own concept so I don’t consider it to be my first website, even though I learned a great deal from it. Let’s get back to talking about my website though
First off, let me say that I never quite comprehended the amount of time and effort that goes into developing your own website. It’s one thing to create a beautiful website with a front-end full of animations and responsive layouts. It’s a whole different beast to integrate back-end technology to provide a fully functional website, complete with user authorization/authentication to unlock the full features of the site and a SQL database for storing the output of the tools. Through the creation of Quality Tools though, I was able to do just that.
Utilizing React, Bootstrap, and Serverless Functions for the front-end, Next.js, Auth0, Google Cloud, and MySQL for the back-end, with deployment through Vercel, Quality Tools ultimately provides the user with the tools they need to solve all of their safety and quality issues. While there is currently only one tool on the website, known as the 5-Whys, I am actively working towards adding more tools now that the framework for the site and deployment has been completed. Feel free to take a gander at the site, sign-up, use the available tools, and provide any feedback on how it can be improved. If you would like to be updated as more tools are added to the site, please feel free to let me know at info@qualitytools.org.
As always, thank you for reading and I look forward to your feedback in the comments below. I hope you have a great rest of the day!
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