ireportsource.com
July, 2017 - December, 2017
Product: An online tool to help health and safety professionals track their workplace incidents, learn from them, and work to prevent them.
Quick runthrough of what the site looked like near the end.
Once my friends from Frio to Fuego had gone home, I continued traveling by myself on my motorcycle from Colombia to Nicaragua while working remotely as a freelance software developer (yes, that picture at the top of the page was my office in Panama). I was lucky to quickly pick up a few small gigs before I joined on as a freelance frontend developer for iReportSource, a startup out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Over the next 6 months I dove deeply into VueJS to build out over 15,000 lines of code from scratch, which support the majority of their users' interactions with the site.
I took joy in the technical challenges like integrating Vuex's state management system, building out initial automated page testing, and standardizing our codebase to be easily expanded on. More important, however, was discovering that I really enjoyed being a software developer. I had studied computer hardware engineering and had released my code to customers in the past, but I had never been solely a 'developer'. This was a significant mental shift for me, but one that I embraced wholeheartedly and found fulfilling. The capstone of this experience came when, after months of building, testing, and iterating in private, we finally released the beta product to our customers and instantly got this feedback:
"I have some great news for [our developers]. Our first trial user has been in the system and testing it and providing us some really solid feedback. Most importantly, he just called me and said that the system works great on the computer and is easier to use than what he's comparing us to." -iReportSource Sales Lead
As I find myself now in El Salvador, I'm still not sure now where my road will lead me next, but I know it will be exciting wherever it goes and that I am grateful for this opportunity to learn, work, and build something people love to use.