I first started my career at Zylo less than one month after graduating from college. Predictably, I had been living off of fast food, at worst, cafeteria food, at best, for four years. It was a rude awakening to enter the real world: the Student Union wasn’t planning my meals anymore.
My coworkers at Zylo unknowingly helped ease me with the transition by showing up for lunch with amazing meals made with no recipe. I was amazed at first but slowly began asking how to cook without a recipe. Over time, I picked up the tips and tricks to successfully wing it and cook meals with or without a recipe.
Over the past year, while I’ve been leveling up my lunches, Zylo has been leveling up our team. When I started as a software engineer at Zylo, I was the 21st employee. Over the past year, our team has grown to 35 employees and our product has grown to be more powerful and impactful. Consequently, all kinds of non-food-related learning opportunities arose.
Zylo’s Software Engineers Collaborate Daily
Software engineering is a complicated field: one that requires a lot of teamwork, much more than people imagine. More than just hacking away at computers, software engineering requires a lot of collaboration and discussion.
One day, one of my coworkers and I were discussing a complicated topic and we couldn’t come to a satisfactory resolution. Each potential solution we thought of was worse than the last. Eventually, frustrated at our standstill, we decided to get some fresh air and go to the store to buy some berries.
We walked to the grocery store down the street, and while walking, we were able to come up with a solution to our problem. By getting out, exercising and getting some fresh air, we were able to come up with a unique solution to a complex problem.
Passion and Respect Lead to Solutions
Not all solutions are a walk in the park (or to the grocery store). Even in my first few weeks at Zylo, we would have meetings where everyone had a different idea of how we should proceed with a given problem.
At first, I feared that a fight would erupt. Soon I learned that the passion and respectfulness exhibited by our team always resulted in brilliant solutions. Yes, heated debates are the norm, but they always result in solutions that address everyone’s concerns and consider everyone’s opinions respectfully.
Morgan Builds Impactful Updates
As I reflect back over this past year, I am beyond grateful for the team who has supported me and the opportunities that have been presented to me. From rolling out simple feature updates to debugging existing code to implementing new features, I’ve had so many opportunities to be impactful at Zylo.
Since beginning my position of Software Engineer At Zylo, I have seen firsthand how a full product functions. It’s been an incredibly humbling experience to realize that real people use the product, that my work truly impacts others: colleagues, customers, and the entire industry.
My favorite feature that I completed was on our authorization process. This feature required a very extensive refactoring of our code base, which I was largely trusted to implement. Ultimately, my experience with the authorization project was extremely rewarding. Even today, I love to edit and discuss this section of the code base.
My main technical area of growth has been APIs. Discovering how we are able to gather data from other applications via their APIs has been fascinating and enlightening. Additionally, through my work with APIs, I’ve learned about security, enacting best practices to ensure that our application remains as safe as possible.
While I’m excited about all the progress we’ve made on the tool and within the team, I’m even more excited about the progress and opportunities that are in front of me. I cannot wait to see what the future has in store for Zylo and this fearless, tireless, and talented team.
