Digital Compositor and Pipeline Technical Director, 2014 to 2016. My first full time job in the industry, and the reason I do this one.
I was hired as a compositor. About three weeks in, the producer asked whether anyone wanted to take a stab at building some tools to ingest the plates we were getting from editorial. I raised my hand, and then taught myself Python so that raising it would turn out to have been true.
After that I wrote little Nuke tools in between working on shots. Nothing clever. They just got used.
We were on crunch and it was brutal. I remember standing in the studio at four in the morning watching everyone plug away at an enormous amount of work, and thinking:
If I can write a small tool that gets used a hundred times a day and saves sixty seconds, everyone can get just that much more sleep each night.
I built a few of those. That is when I fell in love with programming, and it is more or less what I have been doing ever since.
The rest of the job was compositing shots by day and maintaining the render farm everything depended on. Being the person who both uses the pipeline and maintains it is a fast education in which parts of it are actually annoying.
Credited as a digital compositor on Lazer Team (2015).