Two months as a Developer
TL;DR: Two months ago I changed my position from QA Engineer to Software Developer, it has been quite a journey but I'm totally happy :)
Today is my second month anniversary in my new role, it hasn’t been long but it feels like a whole lifetime! I think that I can confirm that time is definitely relative because these two months have felt like ten.
So far, it has been an amazing journey, I was able to contribute to the project even with the tight schedule we had, and I’ve learned a few things along the way :
The first thing is that Software Engineering has a big collaboration component, it doesn’t look like that from the outside as we think of software engineers as lone individuals. However in the context of a project, collaboration is a must; you not only ship code to make things work, you should ship code that is clear and understandable to the team, code that accomplishes a functionality, code that is simple. I must say that all of these characteristics are hard to achieve, and that challenge is pretty exciting.
The second lesson I’ve learned is that it is always better to share and validate your ideas as soon as possible. There is a plethora ways to do something, programming is a very open field and it offers many alternatives. Software Engineers should be careful when choosing a path, mainly because some solutions can be stronger than others, some of them are more maintainable – a working solution isn’t enough. Avoiding validation or sharing can be prejudicial to the project as we can lose time and energy.
As a third point, I must recognize the importance of my previous background; testing is still a very interesting field and I’m starting to see it under a new light, the light of software development. For me testing is definitely a really important part of the process and overall is responsibility of everyone, not only the QA Engineers.
And finally, I must say that what thrills me the most is the feeling of creating. I didn’t realize this until some days ago, but the ability to create something totally new with the power of your mind is amazing. I know that my learning path is long, and that I still need to learn a lot of things, but that is really exciting.
Today is my second month anniversary in my new role, it hasn’t been long but it feels like a whole lifetime! I think that I can confirm that time is definitely relative because these two months have felt like ten.
So far, it has been an amazing journey, I was able to contribute to the project even with the tight schedule we had, and I’ve learned a few things along the way :
The first thing is that Software Engineering has a big collaboration component, it doesn’t look like that from the outside as we think of software engineers as lone individuals. However in the context of a project, collaboration is a must; you not only ship code to make things work, you should ship code that is clear and understandable to the team, code that accomplishes a functionality, code that is simple. I must say that all of these characteristics are hard to achieve, and that challenge is pretty exciting.
The second lesson I’ve learned is that it is always better to share and validate your ideas as soon as possible. There is a plethora ways to do something, programming is a very open field and it offers many alternatives. Software Engineers should be careful when choosing a path, mainly because some solutions can be stronger than others, some of them are more maintainable – a working solution isn’t enough. Avoiding validation or sharing can be prejudicial to the project as we can lose time and energy.
As a third point, I must recognize the importance of my previous background; testing is still a very interesting field and I’m starting to see it under a new light, the light of software development. For me testing is definitely a really important part of the process and overall is responsibility of everyone, not only the QA Engineers.
And finally, I must say that what thrills me the most is the feeling of creating. I didn’t realize this until some days ago, but the ability to create something totally new with the power of your mind is amazing. I know that my learning path is long, and that I still need to learn a lot of things, but that is really exciting.
