I switched from Development into Hiring in the summer of 2021. My initial responsibilities involved conducting a technical interview for candidate applying for the position of Web Application Developer. I had previously created the challenge project that was currently being used, and was given the freedom to interview in the style that I see as the best fit.
My interview style is very conversational. I believe when interviewing that establishing a base level of comfort will allow the person interviewing to give you the most real version of themselves. I chose not to emphasize algorithm tests and pop-quiz style questions, and focused more on a candidate's experience and their problem solving skills.
As I progressed my responsibilities grew to include establishing hiring cadences and practices. I was the first person on the Delivery side to have a position dedicated to hiring, so I was able to establish a process for referrals as well as a solid interview cadence that kept everyone in the loop.
I also established processes and cadences for other departments as well, including QA and DevOps. This involved getting referrals and setting up and conducting interviews for each department.
As the company grew, I assisted with interviewing apprentices, and adjusting our cadences to account for an additional team member. We were in the process of doing this when the company was ended in May of 2023.
My development career started later in life pivoting for the restaurant industry in 2017. I began by taking classes in downtown Fresno at Geekwise Academy. I took 7 classes total learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Angular, and application security.
During the last class, I interviewed and was accepted into the paid internship from Bitwise industries. Our team of 10 developers was assigned to add features and fix bugs on an existing CRM application. This app was an Angular front end, a Node back end with an in-house developed ORM handling a Postgres back end.
Following completion of the apprenticeship, I was hired by Shift3, the development side of Bitwise Industries. My first project was Listing Alert, a real-estate application for managing pre-listings before they hit the MLS. I was the sole developer for the project, which consisted of a React Native mobile app, a React web dashboard to manage users and companies, and a Node GraphQL API to serve them both. The database utilized MongoDB, and the applications were deployed via AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Cloudfront.
After completion of the Listing Alert application, I was assigned to be the main developer to help Fresno Unified School District. There were two main responsibilities during this time: The first was to assist in migrating over 30 department sites from Sharepoint to WordPress. I helped migrate the content over but also had to make sure all sites were AA level WCAG compliant to satisfy accessibility requirements for school sites. The second was adding features, fixing and deploying the School Profiles directory for all the schools in the district. This was also a custom Wordpress site.
The next major project was being called in to help with the New Voice Assembly app. This was a companion app for attendees of the New Voices Assembly. The team needed to execute a front-end redesign of the React web application, and I was able to complete it. This was my last development assignment before moving inro hiring.