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rcblake
rcblake

Posted on

Maybe let's change it up?

I'm usually not much into blogging or journaling but my friends are getting a little tired of me showing them my every little cool new thing that I learn in class or after going down a rabbit hole of nerdy dev things.

Ever since I started at my first startup in 2014, I've had a general curiosity and interest in Dev. Specifically in front-end development, even though I definitely didn't know what it was called back then. I was hired on the customer support team at a fintech startup that had just taken over the stock/finance section of AOL and they were woefully unprepared for the volume of tickets coming in. The site had smooth lines and colorful which was the antithesis of the original AOL site that was basically just a Windows 95 Excel spreadsheet slapped onto a page.

The AOL customers were LIVID!

I spent my days answering hundreds of tickets teaching people with lower computer experience that even though the design may be different, the function was the same. The new 300K users also put a lot of strain on the features so I was also acting QA as the lone person on that team couldn't handle the amount of work needed to decipher what was truly broken and what was just burdened by the traffic.

I fell in love with the problem solving. And while the code itself was still gibberish to me, I took advantage of any opportunity to listen to the engineers talk about the many changes coming to the site and how it was being done. Jump to 10 years later, and I've moved my way up through customer success at some of the largest names in tech but as a program manager, I got to do a lot more technical work and planning and it really reminded me how much I want to deeper into the magic of making these sites.

Now I've stepped away from my role, and am taking those first steps into my new career path!

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