Landing the job here at Chaordix just a month after graduating from SAIT’s now renamed Computer Technology course means while I’m no longer the newest members of the team, I’m still one of the freshest. Although I was looking more to get a job than to find a ‘home,’ I was lucky to find both a year ago. What a year it has been.

Before I started here I had never heard of crowdsourcing, I had filled out surveys in hopes of winning tuition money in school and done ‘grass roots’ surveys at previous jobs, but crowdsourcing…no clue. My first step was to figure out how people used crowdsourcing, which was good, because I had one of the best tools for that right in front of me, the code for the Cambrian House website, all of its communities and for Chaordix. We all work at one big table, so sitting around listening to all of the conversations about different crowdsourcing projects was a big help as well.

Once I had a good handle on what crowdsourcing can be used for, the next step was getting to know the code itself. We have a pretty powerful platform and that means lots of complex code when you are just getting started. On top of that I learned Java in school and here, we use PHP.  While both are Object Oriented languages there are subtle nuances that took a while to get up to speed on. The development team here has been more than willing to offer their help in growing me as a developer.

Now the process is coming full circle, we have a new member of our development team, and hopefully more in the near future. I’m looking forward to seeing someone else go through the same steps and challenges that I did. I’m also hoping this time through, I’ll be able to give some help, since I know all to well how it feels to be just starting out.