Aislinn Walters

Current position: Senior Software Engineer at FM Global

Education (degrees and school): Bachelor degree in Computer Science and Engineering, UConn

Hobbies:

Traveling. I’ve been to 20 countries so far and looking forward to more! My favorite places have been Morocco and Cambodia. When I’m at home, you can often find me playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Where were you born and where did you grow up? Where did you go to high school?

I was born in Hawaii, then moved to Connecticut with my family. I went to high school in central Connecticut.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was little and then a teacher while I was a teenager.

How did you get into computer science?

I liked math in high school so a teacher recommended that I try my school’s computer science class when I was a junior. I signed up for the class and even though I wasn’t very good at it at first, I loved it! Every problem in computer programming is like a puzzle waiting to be solved.

What other jobs have you had?

In college I worked at a greenhouse and I still love plants and landscaping! I also had one internship while in college, working at a small company developing banking software. But since graduating college, I’ve had the same job at FM Global.

What is an average day at work like for you?

I get into work around 8 most days, and one of the first things I do is eat breakfast with my team in the cafeteria. There are 10 people on my team, some programmers, some testers, and some business folks. We then have a quick 15 minute meeting every morning where we talk about what we are going to accomplish for the day.

After that, every day is a little bit different! I usually have one or two meetings each day where I help to plan what features our team will work on next, discuss how we should code a new feature, or present our recent work to the users of our application. There’s also usually a couple of impromptu whiteboarding sessions with other team members.

In between all of that, I spend the rest of the day writing code and reviewing the code that my teammates have written. Most days are a great balance of collaboration and solo coding time.

What is your favorite part of your job?

My favorite part of my job is getting feedback from the people who use my application. It’s such a great feeling to hear that a feature that I worked on has made their day so much easier! I also love hearing their suggestions for new features, and thinking about how we can work it into our upcoming work.