James is a Software Engineer with MediaBeacon, a Minneapolis-based software company that produces a digital asset management technology. James’s role is to address software bugs to improve the overall user experience. This could be responding to customer comments as well as regularly checking the back-end, which includes hundreds of thousands of lines of code to make sure the software is running as it should.
Transcript
I'm James and I am a software engineer. My company, MediaBeacon, produces a digital asset management, or DAM, software. So, basically what that is is these big companies have a lot of digital files and assets, I guess, that they need to deal with and we provide a solution for that. You know, there's searching and sorting and all kinds of stuff they can do with it. Something that would come to my desk would be a bug, let's say, that needs fixing, and I'd go in and I'd fix that. Basically the way it works is that we have a big pool of tickets that need fixing or implementing or whatever, and I can just pick what I wanna work on and it varies day to day, too. You know, I've been on projects that have lasted one, two weeks and I've been on stuff that's lasted less than an hour. So, it really depends on what I'm in the mood for, I guess, and what I decide to pick up. The stuff I have to work on varies from UI stuff, you know, user interface, so if there's, let's say, you're trying to scale a window and one of the widgets, as we like to call them, pops out of the window and you have to scroll over, that's not very, you know, doesn't flow very well, so that was one of the last thing I had to fix. Just making it look better. But there's a huge back end. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code that you gotta kind of comb through and make sure everything's running in tip top shape. For me as an engineer, we have our morning meet at 10 o'clock and we have it over Slack, so we do a chat meeting, and as long as I'm in by 10, that's fine with my manager and you know, I work, put in eight hours and then lunch, and that's it, so it' pretty flexible. You know, sometimes if I wanna leave earlier, I'll show up at 7:30 or 8:00 and sometimes if I wanna sleep in a little bit, I'll show up at 10.
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