My journey between 2009 - 2021

This post is a way for me to reflect on the previous decade, but also to share highlights from it.

2009

I finished my vocational education as a Software Tester in 2009, and landed my first job as a QA Engineer at a Live Streaming/Video On-demand company called MPS Broadband (nowadays called LiveArena AB).

I stayed ~5 years at this job. I learned and matured a lot throughout these years. I was lucky to end up in a company where you got involved in many parts of software development such as gathering requirements, design, development, build & deploy and collaborating with third party vendors.

2014

At this point, I'd started studying JavaScript in my free time. I've got good memories from the site codeschool.com, which later was aquired by Pluralsight in 2015.

I joined the consultant company Konsultbolag1 that offers consultants specializing in QA (test automation, manual testing etc) and Requirements Specialists (Product Owners/Managers etc).

My first consultant assignment was at Länsförsäkringar Bank, and I mostly did manual testing there (with a lot of other manual testers). The culture with all other testers was great, but after 1 year I really felt that I wasn't getting any personal growth. I basically wanted to be coding on a daily basis.

2015

I took a break from working as a consultant, and started out as a QA Lead in a small company which went bankrupt 6 months after I started, which was an interesting experience in itself 😅.

I became a dad in the end of this year, when me & my partner's daughter was born. 👶

2016

I joined the consultant company ADDQ, which was a bit similar to my previous consultant company, i.e. focusing on QA & Requirements Specialists. I started my first (and only) assignment at Ving (or Thomas Cook Northern Europe, nowadays known as Nordic Leisure Travel Group). I was working in the team which were responsible for building the CMS for the web. The expectations from me was to drive test automation (JavaScript/NodeJS), as well as help out with manual testing. I was really happy here, and I was lucky to stay as a consultant here for 3 years. I feel that I got a lot of trust from my team and manager at Ving. I was able to tailor my own role as long as our team delivered what was expected. Manual testing was carried out by the whole team, and I got to focus on test automation, and also getting closer to feature development over time.

This is where I met Stefan Franzén, who has had a great impact on my career. He's my boss today 🙂.

2018

We got our second child, our son. 👶

2019

At this point, I felt that I was ready to try and get a developer role, or something in that direction. I left ADDQ and joined the consultant company (Diabol)[https://www.diabol.se/] which only hired developers and DevOps engineers. I worked there as a Software Development Engineer in Test. Stefan Franzén was already working there, and he recommended me to join Diabol, which I'm so grateful for. This was the first real step towards my career as a developer.

The one and only assignment I had with Diabol was at NetEnt as a Test Automation Engineer. I was working in the Game Framework department, which were responsible for building underlying game framework for all video slot games, and the keypad that you use to interact with the game. I was asked to help out with automated E2E tests, as they had a lot of games being developed and they wanted to run a suite of automated E2E tests on every game. But the existing E2E testing framework couldn't support all games. Instead of trying to fix the existing E2E testing framework, I opted to focus on getting automated tests on lower levels in place, such as component tests & integration tests, because I believe those give the most bang for the buck. This was of course agreed on with the teams and my manager.

2020

I was happy at Diabol, and I was really proud working there. The main problem I had at this time was that I still working mainly with "testing" (even though I was coding every day). I still felt limited and unfulfilled, and I really wanted to brand myself as a developer and be contributing to feature development. I left Diabol and the world of consultancy just before the summer, because I got an offer to join Qred as a "Cloud Developer". I started there after the summer holidays. The job title was a bit odd, but the idea was to convey that I was going to work with Cloud Native software development. I took a leap of faith leaving Diabol. I was looking up to everyone working there. A lot of smart people with passions on improving and speeding up the software development life cycle, which I think is awesome.

The job offer at Qred was exactly what I wanted & needed, and Stefan was actually already working there as Head of DevOps since February. Stefan ended up being my boss, which is quite funny because a couple of years earlier I'd said to him that I could see him being my boss some day.

I was really happy to land this job. I ended up calling myself a Frontend Developer at this point, because I was actually doing frontend development using React, Redux and TypeScript =). The first 6 months I was pairing with another developer (mostly remotely) to build a portable Widget which is an interactive form (tailored for Qred and partners), which can be embedded in any website. I was also utilizing my experience within QA & Test Automation to help the teams get started with unit-, component and E2E tests.

2021

In March I was given the opportunity to switch to another team to work on the Qred Card project. This meant working with NodeJS using serverless technologies in AWS (AWS Lambda with API Gateway), which I previously had only played around with in personal projects. I was still supporting the Widget development, so I was switching between frontend and backend-for-frontend projects quite a bit. At this point I changed my title to Fullstack Developer. =)

I've learned so much since I started in Qred, and I think this is the first time in my career where I've felt that I really have to prioritize on what I spend my time on. There's so much to work on. I'm now responsible for delivering new features, and I'm also fully responsible for delivering that with the best quality possible. All the way out to production, and while the feature is in production. This was a huge difference for me, compared to other big parts of my career where I've been focusing on helping developers making their develepment feedback loops shorter and building automated safety-nets.

In September I was asked to take on the role as the Engineering Manager of the Qred Card team, as part of a re-organization. I was still going to be an individual contributor as all of the other developers, but my primary responsibility was to support the team and help the Product Manager and UX Designer to build the best product possible.

I gladly accepted this offer, which so far has been a very challenging and great learning experience.

It's hard to switch mindset being an Engineering Manager and individual contributor. This topic probably deserves it's own post, but some initial thoughts:

When I pick up a ticket to work on, then it's sometimes hard for me to "get into the zone", because a part of my job is to be available to my team as a leader, which means that I'm going to be interrupted, which is totally fine. It does happen that I turn off notifications though, when I really need to finish something I've picked up. But this doesn't happen very often.

I have a lot more meetings than before, and this also makes it harder to focus on development. I've started to try and be more effective here and only attend meetings that I can contribute to (which I figure out by discussing with the meeting organizer).