Zenput

In 2013 a friend who had founded Zenput offered me a job as a junior software engineer. I had never written a line of code. He figured I would work it out.

For the first couple of years I wrote tests — Selenium, frontend unit tests — which was as much a way to learn the system as a job. At some point I felt like a software engineer when driving a nine-month migration of the client-side codebase from Backbone to React and TypeScript, done soup to nuts with a colleague: the first time I set up all the infrastructure and built something from nothing.

After that I built a React mobile application for food-safety label printing, and then became the manager of the team that took it over. By the end I was running three teams and sixteen people — labeling, the IoT infrastructure behind in-restaurant temperature monitoring, and feature work for Burger King, Tim Hortons and Popeyes. The IoT work and that migration are the two I am proudest of.

That first decision is most of what I believe about hiring. People are capable of considerably more than they are usually given credit for, and someone has to go first.