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Getting back into coding after time away

by Hilary

TL;DR

When people ask me how I got back into coding after years away, my answer is essentially to have a project you can use to either start or add to (either production code or tests), find videos/trainings on the changes since you last coded, and don’t be afraid to just write some code and let Github Copilot give you feedback. Hell, even open up something like CodeAcademy to shake off the cobwebs.

What if you don’t have a project at work you can do this on? Or you want to do it outside of work resources?

  • Think about what you want to learn or focus on – a specific language, a framework, setting up static analysis or CI/CD pipelines, or just getting back into things.
  • Find an application you can run tests against (consider that public applications would have DDoS protections that could affect your automation efforts)
    • You can use mine (or even the older one) that I built for talks using the basic Todo app tutorials for .NET and then modifying (clone and run locally)
    • Or build one yourself (or even have AI build one for you).
  • Analyze the application like you would any other – what kind of tests/updates does it need that also meets the goals you have for this exercise?
  • What kind of training/background information do you need to implement the goals you have?
  • What community do you have that will support you in this endeavor, such as folks at work, LinkedIn, Ministry of Testing, or smaller communities?

Once you get that all squared away, jump in! Start coding/testing/whatevering and share your progress with your community. You’ll be back to confidently writing code in no time 😀

My journey from code to manual and back to code

I spent a good portion of my career “in the code” (mostly C#, some JavaScript) pretty much every day – writing UI and API test automation, doing code reviews of test and production code, setting up and reviewing static analysis, CI/CD pipelines, etc. As well as the manual work of testing, of course.

When I joined Xbox, my job around automation moved to a more PM-type role – what do we need to automate, prioritizing, and working with our tech team to get that implemented (as well as building relationships with the engineers at the studio to get support for our automation from their side). I spent much of my time on the manual work of testing – the test planning and strategy, authoring test collateral, reporting, documentation, support, and the actual hands-on testing. I was getting rusty and itching to get my hands on some code.

As part of our performance reviews, we’d set goals. One goal I set for myself was to spend 1 hour per week on professional development and/or coding. During crunch (and boy did we CRUNCH!), this goal went by the wayside in favor of directly supporting my team. But in the in-between times, I was able to spend a little bit of time here and there helping an internal team with some automation assistance (again in C# and JavaScript, then TypeScript). For a while, I had set my goal to spend 1 day a week coding, and was able to help build an API automation framework for that team, including CI/CD pipelines (C#, RestSharp, and AzureDevOps). I could build with what I knew already, and the small team gave me feedback in PRs about new and fancy features of C# and .NET I could use to improve.

But things got busy again, and again that fell by the wayside.

At the end of 2025, I left direct title support to work in a more experimental place, but in a coding-focused role. The tech team was working on some tooling to make automation easier to implement by more people, and my role was to use the new tools in some experiments and provide feedback. The tools were implemented using C#, and a proprietary framework (part of the experiments). Later, I was tasked with using all of the tools available, including the experiments, integrated in with existing tests for a title. My earlier experiments were solo, but now I’d be working with other engineers to integrate the automation I built into their existing solution.

Here, I needed to skill up a bit. I needed to align with what they were using, their workflows, etc. They were using C# 8 at the time (upgrading to 10 after I started). I looked for some videos to catch me up on the features of C# and .NET since the last one I was super familiar with (C# 3?! lol). The team was also super helpful with suggesting new and fancy ways to do things (like using switch expressions and pattern matching rather than a switch statement). Jumping in and just writing “old style” code, then asking Github Copilot to make it more efficient for me taught me a few things, too. It also helped me to stop the analysis paralysis of “how do I implement this in the best way possible” and just write some damn code!

Another exercise to help me get back into coding was when I was asked to speak at Browserstack Breakpoint this year. I chose a technical talk I had given before (with the short timeline I had), and needed to update the example code for it. The original code used ASP.NET 2.1, last updated almost 4 years ago! So I brought it up to ASP.NET 9 – lots of changes were needed, and that was a fun exercise.

The inevitable question – why didn’t you just let AI write the automation for you, or upgrade the solution for you?

For those experimental tools, and more specifically the framework, AI had nothing to go on. I tried training agents, skills, tools on the framework and existing tests to assist in writing better tests (maybe a skill issue on my end as well). Github Copilot in Visual Studio often suggested code that made no sense and had a ton of errors. Even giving it examples of good code/tests, it often failed. As part of my job at the time, I needed to understand the best ways to write the tests and how the framework was implemented anyway – I needed to provide actionable feedback that would improve the system for everyone. I felt that my hands-on knowledge of the toolset was more important for this task.

As far as not having AI upgrade the solution for my talk – that was fun to do! What better way to learn what has changed in so many years than to do it yourself? And I missed coding for so long, why let AI have all the fun?