Web design had dramatically changed during the time I was out of the industry--HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript frameworks were new fundamental skills that you had to have. There was a lot to catch up on. So after finishing up a 7 month contract as a UX/UI designer for a boss that let me spend time on the slow days to beef up those skills, I got a more permanent contract job working at an insurance company through a contracting company. I had no idea exactly what it was they were going to have me do; the role sounded like a UX/UI Designer, but they called it a Business Analyst, a term I had become acquainted with in my last job that didn't have much to do with UX/UI as I understood it.

What the role was called didn't matter, because as I suspected, I was going to do UI/UX work, but in the capacity as a web developer. Titles are funny, they change over time. I didn't know it at the time, but the work did too. I was so used to doing whatever was needed; I figured all former web designers went through this evolution. It didn't quite work like that.

Our team lead had the vision for the software we created. It was something that had never been built before, and it soon went through the patent process. I co-developed the frontend and backend, which was sparked by my colleague teaching me about MySQL databases. I was familiar with how they worked, but had never set one up myself or made any connections before. It was one of the most useful skills someone had ever taught me. Over the course of slightly more than 2 years, I held a few "lead" roles without formerly being granted the title--I broke what it meant to be called a UX Designer in my division; I handled many areas beyond what that role was meant to do, leading other UX Designers in prototype development, setting up their development environments, installing software on the servers we used and working with IT to manage them, web security, managing databases, and writing pseudo APIs for our frontend. I was essentially a full-stack developer and dev-ops, but not in the manner that people in those roles would traditionally like to think of themselves. We winged it, and it worked. Our lone-wolf team was an anomaly, and I loved working that way. The contractor I worked for awarded me Employee of the Month, for July 2014.