Working at BambooHR gave me incredible opportunities to dive more into the project lead/engineering lead responsibilities. I started small by being the Dev Lead on a couple smaller projects to improve the company's HR software offering and eventually rounded off the experience by filling the role of Dev Lead for new, large survey project from pitch to delivery. There were a ton of important lessons learned about dev resource management, organization, sharing responsibilities, and communication.

Speaking of communication, the mot beneficial gain I have from working at BambooHR was definitely the ability to put aside my concerns and communicate early and often about what I was working on and, much more importantly, any roadblocks I came across.

In this role, I often worked closely with my manager in the areas where I was the expert technically and helped to manage and allocate dev resources using my knowledge of the various developers' strengths and weaknesses.

I also filled the role of Scrum Master for a couple months on my team, getting me invited to the higher level planning and management meetings where I could provide candid feedback on projects and developers to help the company achieve its goals. I quickly acclimated to the responsibilities of leading meetings and really enjoyed the responsibility.

Overall, working at BambooHR was a great experience that took me into a realm beyond just technical competence and into a space of working with different departments on a project and developing a lot of the skills I find necessary for a software engineer to ascend to the level of senior.

Transitioning roles to R1 was a huge milestone in my career. As a full time, React frontend position only, I really got to hone my skills and learn more of the intricacies of React. The largest project our team handled was building out a new design system for the company to facilitate conversation and design work between the developers and the designers.

There was a lot of emphasis in this role to focus on reusability, simplicity, and accessibility of our components to expedite any future work that would lean on our design system. It was a great project and a ton of fun to work on.

This role was also one of my first opportunities to step into more of the soft skills of being a software engineer. Once a week we held a coding class for a few people interested in transitioning their careers. During my time there, we did have one success story of a pupil landing a job as a developer. I also had an opportunity to be a lead on a smaller project utilizing our design system.

Overall, this was a great position that let me seriously hone my FE skillset and start to develop the soft skills/project management aspects of being a developer.

By the end of my time here, I scored incredibly well on skill assessments for React and JavaScript, scoring within the 98th+ percentile.

As Mindfire is a consulting company, I had a lot of opportunities to work on a variety of projects. I came in knowing only JS and its related techs, but quickly became familiar with C# and worked partial full stack, focusing on FE, for a large chunk of my time here.

Most notably, I helped rebuild the Get Away Today website as part of a small team. That was definitely the project that most boosted my skillset as my responsibilities were the frontend in React and the API/service layer in C#. There were a large handful of other projects as well that I tackled as either a solo developer or on a small team using a mixture of mostly React and C#.

This position was very detail focused making sure that patients' samples were correctly routed and tested. I achieved one of the highest levels of quality for my position, providing incredible patient care.