um So I took a nontraditional route, and I feel like that's kind of becoming more and more normal. I took a nontraditional route into to technology. I actually have an undergraduate degree in journalism, and I ended up at a software company doing quality assurance for them. I spent the next five years at software companies working mostly in non technical roles, account management, project management, Um, you know, leading a small team that did the development, and I finally decided to take the plunge. I had wanted to move over to the technical side of things for a while, and so is part of that. I started the master's program at the University of Utah and Information Systems and and just continued to do formal education. I did a lot of studying on my own time. Um, I used different programs online to learn about software development and just become more familiar with technical topics and and the company I was working at, I started to take on more technical projects, started to really get into integrations and automation. Um, you know, making manual tasks automated. Uh, that is a big, um, You can make a lot of people happy by automating manual tasks and just continued to pick stuff up is I went and, um, I was working as a customer support representative when I started, and a couple of years ago, I transitioned over. Now my job title is a cloud integrations engineer. Um, that's what I do today. What?

sure. Eso obviously with co vid I've been working from home full time since March of this year. Um, before that I was working from home a couple of days a week, and, um, I'm one who likes to go to the office every once in a while, But now my company is allowing us to work from home. Uh, you know, as into the future as long as we want and need to, um, as's faras my responsibilities, I use an integration platform. Um, my job is all about integrating our back end systems so that they can communicate with each other. They can achieve business requirements. They can automate processes for our sales and marketing organizations. Um and so I mean, a lot of my time is spent gathering business requirements, having meetings with stakeholders about, uh, features, um, and then actually developing and building those feature sets into an application. I, you know, go through the deployment process on Q and A and testing applications. Um, and that's that's the bulk of the of what I spend doing. Um, I don't really travel much for my job. We do tend not this year, obviously. But in the past. We typically will go toe one conference a year just to kind of keep keep up on skills and see what's going on in the industry. Right from my regular job responsibilities, there's no travel.

kind of got my start by learning python on my own. Um, I had a lot of just self study, um, and that became useful later on. The python is a very beginner, friendly programming language on do You can use it in all sorts of situations and projects. Um, in my in my role. Currently, we use a project or a system called Mule Soft, which is an integration specific, um, platform, um, that it relies heavily on application programming interfaces or a PS two send data around different systems on DSO. That's primarily what I develop in on gun. I use, you know, database systems like post grass and to do to store data. But those were the primary technologies that they use.