Over 10 years ago, I began a career transfer from an adult support worker (or whatever that role is called now, a care assistant in old money) to one in Computer Science. I knew on beginning my Degree in Enterprise Computing, a programme that I attended thanks to Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), that what I wanted to do with the rest of my life was software development. Through the course, I discovered that my two best classes were Programming, and Business Studies and management. My least favourite and consistently poor results fell into the Database and Structured Query Language (SQL) side of things.
Whilst I kept writing through University and beyond (exclusively through the pages of Micro Mart at that point), it became very obvious that in order to progress as a developer, [software development] had to be the main focus in my life, so writing became much less important to me. I had a good technical grounding in programming languages thanks to MMU but especially due to an unexpected almost full year at the University of Derby Games Programming course (this was due to Government funding cuts thanks to a certain coalition of chaos that I won't mention further).
At Derby I had covered a lot of C and Visual C++, some MIPs, Java for Android and some other languages. Being focused on entertainment rather than application software meant a whole lot more programming but no database theory, management or SQL. I did make the point that SQL will become more important even in the games programming world, something that at least one of my lecturers acknowledged. How else are you going to store all of that data for all of those online games?
Anyway, I started as an web application developer thanks to an Internship. After about one year, I had my first job proper at a company in Wolverhampton. I was taken on as a Junior Developer and as a content writer. Our primary technology was a LAMP sort of stack; that being Linux, Apache, MySql (or MariaDB) and PHP. We were running a version of Magento version 1.7.1, and had some front-end CSS compilers that apparently made front-end development more easier, though I've always thought that the benefits of something like SASS has very marginal benefits over straight CSS. That aside, in each new role I undertook from there, I learnt a lot. So what sort of advice would I give now to junior developers? Or someone inspiring to change career to become a developer?
The first thing I'd say is that there is never a bad time to learn something new. Although not everyone is suited for a role as a software developer, like not everyone can be a Nurse, nor a Doctor, if you have a logical mind and you are able to break down problems to small manageable chunks, and you don't mind learning how to debug then this could be for you.
But as a developer, what issues might you come across? I've found that being a developer is often quite different than programming alone. As a developer, you usually need to work collaboratively, and conform to certain standards and expectations. And whilst you should be given some slack as a junior, your work will still need to be maintainable and scale as necessary.
In my first job proper, the so-called senior developer made two critical mistakes that were even apparent to me after just over one year in the industry; firstly, the version of Magento that we were using was core hacked, meaning that we couldn't easily upgrade it.
My senior colleague developed a service that would produce JSON for pricing data; this data could move up and down every second based on current market prices. Whilst his service was perfectly good, and served the website well, I had developed an iPhone and Android application that was dependent on it.
Shortly after this application was released, he decided to change the API to deliver a different JSON structure. That would have been fine in other circumstances, but he made these changes without consulting anyone else, and whilst he was able to fix the website JavaScript charts that consumed it, he didn't inform me of the changes and therefore my application had been rendered useless. This happened during the last few weeks of my time there, and I had no way to update the application quickly or easily, and he didn't understand the application to fix it as some of it was Objective C and he refused to work outside of his conform zone which rapidly became the PHP framework Laravel.
As a developer, no matter how senior you think you are, or you become, do not make unilateral changes by yourself. Consult others first, especially those people in your team. And if you make a mistake, admit it. The sooner you do, the sooner it can be fixed. Other developers making unilateral changes has caught me out on other occasions too. One server change cost me well over 1 week of debugging because this change wasn't announced to anyone. This change was unnecessary and on a development server, although making such a change without agreement on a production server might have caused even more headaches!
My final piece of advice is to never assume that you know everything, and do not assume that just because you know something that everyone else in your team has that same knowledge. I've done presentations that I never expected to; one was why computers do not divide by zero, and another was about the difference between scalar values and objects. I have a small advantage over many of my younger colleagues in that I grew up programming, and many of the computer magazines that I'd buy growing up would be aimed at teaching children like myself computer programming too. So concepts like Integers and Boolean values, loops, branches and conditionals are kind of second nature to me even if the terminology may have changed. But even good people with good degrees may not have such a good grounding in programming principles even if they're perfectly good developers otherwise.
I've learnt a lot from my colleagues over the years too. As one of my lecturers once said to me, if you're not learning as a developer, you'll soon be obsolete.
