Hello, I'm Lewis Prescott
QA Lead at Cera Care a home care startup (one of Europes fastest growing companies). I read Psychology at University of East Anglia before moving in to Software Testing.
My Story
After graduating from UEA, I started an apprenticeship at a small company based in Chelmsford where I had a support role getting involved in sales, marketing, account management and software testing.
I built on my software testing experience at The Test People (now Ten10), where I completed their graduate scheme. The intensive program involved learning the basics of functional, performance, automation and agile. I wasn't very good at the programming at the time, we were learning python and had to build a blackjack game as one of the assignments. My game had A LOT of duplicate code and crashed if someone went over 21...
After learning Java automation while on a client, I've never looked back. Working alongside very kind, helpful developers and test engineers (especially at ASOS & ZAVA), I've now become comfortable with multiple programming languages including Python!
Early on in my career I went from Senior Automation Engineer to QA Lead where I was managing a team of QA's and responsible for test strategy, it was a little overwhelming and took me away from hands on activities. Therefore I took a step back from management, moved to a healthcare startup (ZAVA) where I could work closely with developers to improve my coding and understanding of designing web applications.
Working in a cross functional team really opened my eyes to the potential of working as a QA Engineer which led me to my time with ASOS, where I learned ATDD & TDD practices. Working on an application of this scale and being involved in Black Friday sales taught me a lot about architecting web services.
Following on from this experience I moved to the charity Cancer Research UK, here I worked closely with the DevOps on a project learning how to build infrastructure as code.
This journey has led to being the QA Lead at Cera Care, here I manage a team of QA Engineers across Web, Mobile & Data Science led projects.
In 2021 I had a daughter which has led me to spend more time with her by working 4 days a week and also while she is asleep focus on my side hustle Pactman Consulting.
In 2022 I took 3 months as part of shared parental leave, which has been an amazing time seeing my daughter learn to walk and develop in to a proper toddler (tantrums and all). During this time I started a podcast as well.