I’ve always worked freelance. Mostly as a graphic and web designer, including coding the front-end. I’m mostly self-taught as a programmer, skilled in Bash, HTML, and CSS, and competent in JS and Ruby.
For a while now I’ve started to notice that what I really enjoy is the web scraping and browser automation I do for myself. I tend to use Ruby for the task, relying mostly on Nokogiri and Watir. I do it to automate repetitive tasks on websites or to build personal RSS/JSON feeds of websites that do not provide them (or are limited in what they provide). I don’t feel tied to those technologies. I enjoy them but feel confident I can learn another language/library enough to get the job done, if need be.
1. Having never worked professionally as a programmer, and having no formal training, what kind of job or contract/freelance work should I be searching for?
2. What’s the job title of someone that does this type of work?
3. Are there any specific skills I should be cultivating? For example, if most available work for these skills is in testing (is it?), should I be focusing on learning a testing framework?
4. Are there any specific technologies you’d recommend I learn? Why?
5. Any other advice?
Many QA departments need people who can automate their manual interaction step process to ensure that a service is behaving correctly.
It’s costly to manually check all the user stories that an application supports, and automating this can be a career path for an employee or a contractor.
My recommendation would be to get your foot in the door at a company that has a large manual QA process and is looking for someone to write for them automated tests, or convert their manual steps into tests.