Reading an article on Read an article on Oreilly.com about Software Engineers and it really resonates with me – feel free to read the article yourself. As a Software Engineer, I have discovered the miracle of self development. No company or manager can stop you if you choose the path of “continuous” self development. The world of programming used to be a mystery to me – I only discovered computers after my first degree! The question then was, how can texts and machines do so much? I remember a colleague at Shazam encouraging me to pick up a programming language. Don’t get me wrong, I was a Manual Test engineer back then and I love find bugs. It gives my great pleasure and my colleagues were aware of it. It was all manual testing until I find a bug and I had to check the server logs – for proper bug reporting – everything changes, I seem to be lost in the world of “Why is this happening?”
I took up the challenge and found a book on C (that was in early 2005!) – I was carefully advised to ignore it and go for an Object Oriented language. Java was the king then and I started studying and writing code – for real! I became excited about the fact that I could write some lines of code – hence having a better understanding of what’s happening in the backend. This greatly improved my communication of bugs to the developers. So rather than just say “the server did not return any message” it became “there was an exception thrown due to null entry on the IVR (then paste the stack trace of the exception)”. That was the start.
Since that nudged-start in 2005, I have added to my arsenal as a Software Engineer, new languages, test frameworks, web frameworks to mention but a few. So what do I need to improve in 2016?
Managing people and technology. More Cloud technologies — maybe AWS certification (to make me more serious :)), building and deploy SaaS apps with TDD, BigData plus Analytics, Leadership for engineers and I might peep into the Software Architect world. I think having a bird’s eye view of software systems might be a good thing. I will review this at the end of the year. Have a great year engineering softwares that make a difference!