This month, we feature Theresa Deering to talk about her role at Uplight and the highlights of working here!
What do you do for Uplight?
The short answer is… I ask questions.
As Lead QA Engineer in the Vancouver office, I provide leadership, training, and advocacy with the goal of promoting quality. I am a member of the Party Parrot engineering Scrum pod where I help ensure that we are both building the right thing and building it right. I also perform manual and automated checks on print and email home energy reports before they are sent out to customers.
Right now, I am working hard to start a Quality Guild within the Uplight organization. This guild is a place where people who are interested can come and discuss anything related to quality. If you work at Uplight and are interested in helping build products that delights our clients, message me!
What do you find most exciting or rewarding about working for Uplight?
I find it very exciting to be working for a B Corp. It is a certification that I believe in, and I am glad it is getting traction in the business world.
I find it rewarding to be working towards the ambitious goal of reducing carbon emissions by 100 million metric tonnes of CO2 in five years. It’s always exciting to see how much our client’s customers can save by the end of a program with us.
How does the work you do contribute towards towards creating a more sustainable future and better customer energy experiences?
One of the projects that I worked on soon after joining Ecotagious, now a part of Uplight, was to automate many of the manual checks that our production (operations) team was performing for every report run. Without this automation it would have been impossible for us to verify the daily results needed for our Voice Assistant pilot with BC Hydro.
How did you get into this work?
After working as a full-stack developer for 5 years in companies that didn’t seem to put as much effort into quality and user experience as I would have liked, I made the switch and became a tester. I love it. I have much more variety in my day, I get to talk to many more people in non-development roles, and I feel like I have a better big-picture view of the product.
I joined legacy Ecotagious in September 2018 after searching for a company whose mission better aligned with my personal values, and this summer we were acquired by Uplight.
What has been your favorite project so far at Uplight?
Much of legacy Ecotagious’ code base is in its SQL database. My favourite project so far was discovering that it is possible to write “unit tests” for stored procedures, implementing them, and getting them running in our continuous integration pipelines. With this in place, I have a lot more confidence in our data processing.
What is one thing that has most surprised you about working here?
It surprises me how much energy we can save simply by telling people to turn down their thermostats in the winter!
