School is back in session and so is Ship It! Our podcast is returning from summer break with an all-new installment in our Origin Stories series.

This time around, our guest host Keegan Sands profiles Tiffany Pereira, our Quality Assurance  (QA) lead at Rocket. Like many of our developers, Tiffany didn’t quite expect to wind up in the tech world. She started out as a tentative English major in college before eventually taking a computer science course as a liberal arts requirement. Her professor convinced her shortly after to switch her major and, after college, a lucky break with a QA co-op led to her finding her calling.

Tiffany’s first real gig after her college and co-op days was at IBM (maybe you’ve heard of it) but she didn’t stick around long and eventually went from the big corps to a smaller company (at the time) called Rue La La Boutique, a Boston-based invitation-only online store connecting customers to brand name sales. From there Tiffany found an amazing deal on a down comforter (ten bucks!) and her way to Rocket.

QA lends Tiffany an objective view in product development that requires a ton of cognitive thinking. At first she assumed QA was just a stepping stone towards her own career in development but she ultimately fell in love with the variation in QA day-to-day.

“As nerdy or as goofy as it sounds I really enjoy this,” she says, “I love figuring out how things work.”

But that’s not to say QA isn’t challenging either. At IBM one engineer had the gall to call her feedback “stupid” and in some ways it's thanks to him that Tiffany learned to stick by her feedback and challenge developers to push themselves harder every day. In her words she can be “stubborn” and “persistent” and we at Rocket agree that these are some of the qualities that make her a QA powerhouse.

Tune to the whole Origin Story here (or wherever you get your podcasts) and learn more about Tiffany’s approach to QA and how it came to be!