I worked as a Software Developer at Paycom, a payroll and HR software company based in Oklahoma City.
My role included finding and fixing bugs ranging from security vulnerabilities to frontend visual defects. The legacy codebase was evolving from strictly PHP to a React SPA-driven framework, and navigating the differences and interactions between these two parts of the application taught me a lot about what the company has learned over the decades!
Throughout my time there, I invested a significant amount of time and effort in honing my sense of style as a programmer. I believe in the power of clean code to reduce complexity and create a product stable enough to stand the test of time and the perils of caffeine-driven development. I applied this developing sense of craftsmanship in my own development work as well as in peer code reviews, ensuring that future developers inherit a well-considered and tidy codebase to maintain.
One unexpected difficulty of working in this environment was navigating a somewhat unstable sense of job responsibilities. Over the course of my employment, there were a number of reorganizations of the software side of the company, including rebalances of the roles of QA testers and developers. As a result, I learned to be dynamic and flexible, maintaining efficiency even as my job duties and workflows changed. While the turbulence was frustrating, I'm pleased with the progress I made as a software professional. Unfortunately, these very same reorganizations and rebalancings led to significant layoffs, and I was one of the many that were let go.
- PHP
- React
- MySQL
- Jira ticket management
- Automated testing
- Code documentation