Watching your favorite shows on a streaming service feels effortless, but there's a lot happening behind the scenes every time you press play. Software engineers keep the wheels turning, and 满帆 grad Ulric Esparra helps backend requests run smoothly at Sling TV.

Ulric says he chose an academic career at 满帆 so he could graduate and join the workforce in two years instead of four. During his time in the Software Development bachelor's program (now called 计算机科学), he learned foundational skills in operating systems and databases that prepared him for his work at Sling, as well as programming languages like Python and C++. After graduation, Ulric landed a job as a Software Test Engineer at Scientific 游戏 in Chicago. A few years later he moved to Colorado to be a Software Test Engineer at Sling TV, where he was recently promoted to Software Engineer I.

At Sling, Ulric does a lot of work in JavaScript with APIs, databases, documentation, and more. His team currently specializes in backend conversations between Sling's partners and Sling's services.

"Whenever you try to go to a website and log in to watch Sling, or if you're on a device like a phone or a Roku TV, there's some communications that have to happen between that client and our backend services to enable it,乌尔里克解释道. "Are you paying through Sling or a third-party service? When you make changes to your account, who needs to be notified so you're billed correctly? 诸如此类的东西."

A typical day for Ulric involves staying in the loop with scrum ceremonies, picking up tickets for coding work, and partnering up with teammates for exploratory work.

“有了这种合作关系, 很多人会说‘哦, we currently have a partnership coming up with so-and-so. 我们需要一些时间, 浏览文档, understand how their partnership backend works, 准备一些文档, 呈现给团队,’”他说.

Using his JavaScript skills to excel is the best part of Ulric's day: "Whenever I get to pick up a JavaScript story, it makes me excited; it's the language I love to work in,他说. "Being able to pick something up in that tech stack I know really well and be able to just really knock it out of the park is what I enjoy the most."

Ulric also loves helping out up-and-coming software engineers at Sling. And he's got his eye on management roles for the next step in his career.

“我喜欢当教练。. 我喜欢辅导. I love to be someone that people can depend on and ask for help and know that I can help them… So that's something that I'm working towards next, 是管理."

Ulric's programming language skills and his love of coding helped him find an exciting role, but his willingness to take an indirect path led him to his current job at Sling.

"I should have hit the ground running [after graduation] as a developer, but I took a job as a tester when I went to Scientific 游戏… So technically my job wasn't development. 但正因为如此, I got the opportunity at Sling to be a tester, which then gave me an opportunity to be a developer. Just because it's not the title that you're looking for doesn't mean it's not the next right step for you."