My WordPress Career: Romine Cavalcante

My WordPress Career is an employee spotlight on the StellarWP blog. In each edition, we highlight a different team member’s professional journey.

While each story is unique, they all demonstrate that there isn’t one single way to arrive at a career in WordPress. Our team members come from different backgrounds, and each person brings a different type of expertise to their role. And we think that’s pretty stellar.

Today, we’re talking to Romine Cavalcante, QA Analyst at StellarWP.

StellarWP: What was your very first job? Tell us what your duties entailed.

Romine Cavalcante: I started as a QA when QA didn’t really exist. My official role was a Requirements Analyst, and I was responsible for transcribing a project from diagrams to a document, so everybody on the team could understand. I tested the prototypes, projected the interface to the features and even created user guides. I was the very first QA from my hometown, and as it was a job in Ascension, I trained a lot of people there.

We’ve learned that you are a motorcycle enthusiast. Tell us about how you started that hobby and your best memory on the road.

RC: Hahaha, it started with my husband. He always had an interest in motorcycles, and recently bought one. We always loved to travel, camping etc, so, traveling by motorcycle was a fun way to do that.

What’s your current job at StellarWP? What do your duties include now?

RC: I’m a QA Analyst. I’m responsible for planning test cases, executing them, looking for best practices of testing and verifying our new features.

When did your career shift toward WordPress?

RC: My job on The Events Calendar was my very first job with WordPress. I was afraid at first because it was my first time working with it. I was a bit afraid of not being able to meet the requirements.

Is there anything you learned on your first job that you carried with you to your current role at StellarWP?

RC: I have always been a really methodical person, and it helped me a lot at the beginning of my IT career. Since college, I have always been attentive to details and how to share them with others.

Being a QA comes naturally to me. I even joke that I don’t work, I have fun. And it was the same when I came to the team at StellarWP. I feel like I’ve been in the team for a decade, although it’s been less than a year and a half. It’s easy to talk with everybody on our team, and how to share details, and how to point out things for improvement. Everybody is really helpful and a good listener.

How is working in WordPress different from other jobs you’ve had? What do you like best? Are there any parts that are more challenging?

RC: It’s a mix of difficult and fun. As it is a different way of testing things, I had to learn a new pace for how to get it done, but it’s fun because it doesn’t matter how much time passes, I notice how much I still can and need to learn.

I think the most challenging thing was not having rollbacks. With products we are used to, if something goes wrong, we can just rollback to the previous version and think in a way to work around later. With WordPress, we really need to pay attention so nothing will happen to anything that would need an immediate fix, as we can only have hotfixes. But I still prefer the more difficult mode.

What do you wish you had known when you first started working in the WordPress world?

RC: I wish I had known that I didn’t need to be that afraid.

Although there was a lot of learning at the beginning, I had a great time following guides and I realized that I could start learning by myself faster than I thought. And all the different ways of testing things that I learned made it even better.

What are some of your hobbies, interests, or pastimes outside of work?

RC: I have so many, hahaha. First, I love animals. My favorite pastime is to care for our pets. Sometimes if I’m stressed, or nervous, my main medicine is to hug a dog or smell a cat. Now I’m starting a breeding kennel as a hobby, so let’s see how it goes. I collect some toys too, such as Dinosaurs, Nendoroids, and Anime stuff in general.