When I started my professional career at Rackspace, I initially chose to work on a support team so that I could expand and learn from highly experienced System Administrators. After my time with that team, I continued on to a Software Development role, where we focused on engineering test automation. In addition to a solid understanding of Linux and Python, this required the ability to work with automation technologies like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. During my time at Rackspace, I was privileged to work with a number of different projects with varying scopes and responsibilities. Using prior knowledge from the Linux Support team helped greatly as I wrote a number of scripts to help automate manual efforts for testing and diagnosing of different software and systems. This included work with our Private Cloud deployments using Ubuntu, centos, and RHEL. Our work covered a large expanse of fields like hardware provisioning, databases, monitoring, virtual networking, containerization, ACLs, etc. We also developed frameworks to validate various deployments and their configurations. I also had the opportunity to work with another team on testing and troubleshooting our deployment of Atlassian products, and other internally developed software used to help the support teams across Rackspace. Often, when we ran into issues, it was our responsibility to triage the failures. Due to the complex nature of the products and services we worked with, we often collaborated with other development teams, system architects, and support engineers, to better understand their nature so that we could find solutions. For existing workflows, I would always attempt to identify inefficiencies. By streamlining certain processes, I sometimes found solutions that were orders of magnitude faster to execute; a process that normally took days, would only take a few hours.My journey continued as I moved on to Fiserv, where I continued as a Software Engineer in the Quality division. During my time there, I worked on developing dynamic frameworks to help identify issues with several products critical to business operations. This included work with APIs and web applications. While our team was very geographically diverse, we were all able to work together very effectively, with each developer bringing a unique set of skills to the table. Opportunities for skill-sharing and mentorship were ubiquitous, so I was able to learn much from my time there. I was also able to share my learned skills and methodologies with others to help foster a more consistent and structured development framework.