Tiffany Morse

Background

About Tiffany Morse

tldr: From writer/editor to tester to developer, but always with a cup of coffee. I love a good puzzle: digging into the details, stepping back and sipping on a warm cup of coffee, the caffeine boosting my energy and focus while I reexamine the big picture, and then drilling back down to find a solution. In my previous career as a textbook editor, those puzzles involved developing content to instruct and delight, but it also involved more granular work like fact checking and proofreading. It was creative work, but it was also methodical. When I started working as a software test engineer, I found many correlations to my work as an editor. Where I had once imagined myself as a kid trying to understand a poem, now I imagined myself as an end user. What questions would I have? What expectations? Where would I get confused? I tested for required functionality with an eye on the user experience. Then I taught myself JavaScript and dove into code. There I found a world full of creativity and logic and the kind of work that makes my brain hurt in that wonderful way that a good workout makes one's muscles ache. I learned. I read. I completed online courses.(Thanks, freecodecamp.org.) I experimented with some simple Node apps. I wrote more automated tests. I built a web page highlighting short stories I had written. When an opportunity to move into full-time development came up, I didn’t hesitate. I admit, those early days were painful. More than a few times, I banged my head against my desk trying to understand why the linter was yelling at me. I cried (I'm not ashamed to admit it.) when I couldn't get my code to work. I asked questions, and while I waited, I found answers. And through all the forehead bruises and tear-soaked tissues, I kept coming back for more—more of the pain, but also more of the joy, the triumph of seeing the page look like the wireframe or the function returning complex calculations correctly. I built a web app using React with Typescript. I contributed to a backend decoding byte packets from IoT firmware. I learned a new meaning for Big Endian and Little Endian.(Jonathan Swift would be baffled.) One night, in my excitement, I drew a diagram to explain hexadecimal to my befuddled 11-year-old. I've been fortunate to be surrounded by amazingly supportive colleagues and mentors who help me move forward as I make things go. I'm making text and data appear, building an experience for a user whom I will never meet. And I'm only on my first cup of coffee.