Work
Professional
Humi
Prodigy Education
Prodigy was my first professional experience working in React, having only previously used React for personal projects. This was an excellent opportunity to gain an understanding of more advanced React concepts and learn many lessons in writing clean, maintainable, readable code from other talented developers.
I brought along my vast a11y knowledge I had acquired from my previous roles, and used it to teach others how to build and test accessible components. This work required regularly creating new components, and refactoring legacy ones in the StoryBook component library.
My time at Prodigy also opened up many opportunities to learn other skills. I spent a lot of time working with co-op students and Junior Developers. This allowed me to discover the joy and value in mentoring others, while also improving my skills and ability to lead.
During my time at Prodigy, I discovered a large, complex piece of tech-debt, that was degrading the end-user experience while also impeding the developer's ability to test code. I learned how to define a project plan so that my team could work together to resolve the issue. The plan included requirements gathering, metrics measurements, problem definitions, and many technical spikes to gain a deep understanding of the underlying issue.
Canada Life Assurance Company
I first started working at Canada Life in my 3rd year of university as a 16 month internship. I worked on the application support team which involved both debugging and development. I often had to work with legacy code and was a member of the 24/7 on-call production support rotation. This position taught many lessons in working under pressure and was my first introduction into professional software development. I continued to work in this position part-time during my final year of school and shortly after graduation.
In 2018 I was as one of 5 developers chosen to work on redesigning the site I had supported in my previous role. This was my introduction to working as a full-stack developer, and in an agile environment.
In 2019 I moved once more to another Agile lab in Toronto, focusing on a different area of the business. During this time, I had a heavy focus on accessibility, being one of the main contributors in bringing our site to meet WCAG AA standards.
