Contributing to production without an engineering background
Coaching an operations professional with no software background to build a client-requested feature into their company's production portal and navigate the review and release process that ships it safely.
An operations professional worked at a company with a mandate that everyone builds and contributes to the production codebase. Their background was in operations, with some familiarity with SQL but no software engineering experience.
The task was to build a feature that one of the clients they supported needed in their company's operational portal, adding it to the production codebase in a way engineering would approve. First, we had to get a local development setup working, resolving local database and login flow issues, to provide a foundation to test our changes. We then discussed how to scope the pull request, deciding what belongs in the change and what to leave out, to give it the best chance of being approved, and built a working understanding of the development-to-staging-to-production promotion process: how it enables safe testing and keeps bad code from reaching customers.
My role was to help them contribute real production software despite coming in without an engineering background, turning their operational knowledge of what the client needed into a change that could move through the team's review and release process on its own merits.