ShipEngineer Spotlight: Paislee House

What is your role at ShipEngine?

As a support agent, I provide assistance to users via chat and email. This usually means answering general questions about how ShipEngine works and troubleshooting any errors that our users run into.

What does your typical work day look like? 

My typical day involves monitoring Zendesk for incoming chats and emails. I also spend a lot of my day testing and troubleshooting various aspects of the ShipEngine API with Postman. When there’s time, I also try to work on work-oriented projects. 

How long have you been working on ShipEngine?

I’ve been working with ShipEngine for about 8 months. Prior to that I spent a year working for our sister company ShipStation.

How did you get into this type of work?

I moved to Austin about two years ago and had just completed a coding bootcamp in St. Louis called LaunchCode. When I arrived in Austin, I realized there was a lot of opportunity in the tech world. Support roles seemed to be a great mix of my past job experience and the new knowledge I had gained at LaunchCode. 

What is one of your proudest achievements? 

Not too long ago I built a patio table with a cement top, made out of all used materials (thanks Habitat for Humanity ReStore). I built the form and set the concrete and everything! It was one of the first “big” things I built all on my own (disclaimer: my wife did assist with pouring the concrete). 

What tech do you get to work with?

I most frequently use Postman as it’s where we do the majority of our troubleshooting and testing. There’s also a lot of interaction with Zendesk, Slack, and Atlassian as well. From time to time, I use Visual Studio Code if I’m looking at code from users to make it more readable. 

What did you want to be when you “grow-up”?

When I was younger I really wanted to direct movies. So I guess it’s natural that I ended up in Austin where movies are a large part of the culture (with things like the Alamo Drafthouse, SXSW, Fantastic Fest, and the Austin Film Society). 

What’s one FAQ you receive often, and your solution for users? 

I feel like we get a good amount of questions concerning carrier abilities like multi-package shipments and third party billing. Though ShipEngine supports those features, not all carriers do. So I usually point users to the List Carrier Options section of our documentation where they can see any carrier-supported advanced options for their carriers connected.

Do you have any hidden talents?

I’m not sure if it’s a “hidden” talent but I do a lot of woodworking and woodcarving in my spare time. Growing up, a lot of my family members had personal workshops out of their garages — so building things with my hands was just something I discovered naturally. You could say it runs in the family.

What’s one feature of ShipEngine you want more users to discover?

Warehouses! With ShipEngine you have the ability to create a warehouse which stores your ship from and return to information. This way you can simply use a warehouse_id when creating labels and shipments instead of having to constantly type out the ship from and return to information.

Using warehouses also lets you manifest your shipments at the end of day (for the carriers that require them)!

How do you spend your free time?

I probably enjoy reading the most, but I also like to go to the movies, play video games, go hiking/bird watching, woodworking. Hanging out with my wife, our dog, and two cats is always a great way to spend my free time as well.