I was a QA tester at a transportation company with a PHP stack. My leader was great and allowed me to teach myself web development when tasks were done. Eventually I built a finance calendar in php/symfony modeled after the websites the team built.

I demo'd it to him and I was allowed to start picking up development issues. Eventually became a full time developer. Kept learning and ended up containerizing all our applications and set up a kubernetes cluster, moving us away from VMs. ( responding to a desire from all the devs to start using docker ).

Circled back around and built automation for spinning up k8s testing environments for each the story in the QA queue to simplify things for our testers. By the time I the left the company, they hired a whole company to do everything I was doing, which I held off leaving until they were set up and I was able to knowledge transfer fully to the company. Moved to GoLang also now, don't really do php anymore.

Though still get keepalived alerts when a node goes down.