Review of my 6 month contract and looking back on working for an airline during a global pandemic. Summary of tasks completed and learning takeaways.
November 2020 - May 2021
I was the first person that Porter Airlines had hired that was remote. This came with some challenges in terms of getting set up on Porter's code base (which is giant!). I also had to learn C# and ASP.NET. My first few weeks involved navigating the code base and taking time to learn the basics of C#, ASP.NET and getting reacquainted with Jquery and knockout.js.
I was hired to complete two releases. When the pandemic hit Porter took this time to develop an app as well as rebrand for a more price conscious target marget. There was a change in target market because there was an assumption that when the world opened back up that folks would not be travelling right away, but would have to be coaxed into travelling. There was/is also an assumption that there will be a smaller amount of travellers and therefore airlines will be competing for a smaller market. The design below was done by the design team.
One of the tasks that I was assigned at Porter was to do the accessibilty for the pages I was coding. I was managing accessibilty with JAWS and NVDA software. I had never used this software before and the learning curve was rather steep for me as the bugs that surfaced sometimes had to do my work environment, the interactions with the Porter styleguide and sometimes bugs within the software. Learning this software and doing a deep dive into it has made me look at web applications differently, design differently and look at my own work in a new light.
Learning a new language on the job was something I was nervous about, especially learning multiple languages that I had never been exposed to. I got a lot of great support from my collegues during this time and was given space and time to get my feet wet with C#, ASP.NET and knockout.js.