It's currently a little after 10pm... Again it's the time of the day were I sit in front of my private computer and try to find a way to use my sparetime in a meaningful way.
At first glance this might sound a little unsatisfied but that's not what I mean...
Let us take a step back and draw the big picture.
About me
During business hours I am one of two programmers in a company respectively a plant of a company that is not know for their software products. The company itself is not even part of the software industry but... I kind of am.
I'm building and maintaining software solutions for inhouse usage.
Being a programmer in this kind of environment comes with quite some challenging tasks. But again don't get me wrong I like the challenge.
1. Handle the full stack
As I started out I didn't even know that developers are categorized by frontend/ backend/ fullstack etc. Getting deeper into what I do on a daily basis was when I realized even if my job description is just engineer I'm more likely a software engineer/developer forced to be a fullstack-developer. And by fullstack I mean:
hosting applications on IIS
design MSSQL databases and queries
build and maintain WPF desktop applications
build and maintain ASP.NET webapps
... and of course git/github. A lot of technologies, a lot to learn and for me a guarantee that every day I'm forced to learn something new.
2. Dealing with legacy code
It's 2022 and VBA is still a thing or at least in some tiny corner cases. If you have a legacy service in conjunction with a broader IT-infrastructure you're not able to easily replace it, especially if it's built upon interfaces of partner systems like SAP. Changing to newer technologies without changing bigger chunks of the whole landscape, that are out of your reach, forces you to stick to some legacy code.
But I was actually surprised to still find VBA ranking 22nd in most-popular-technologies on the 2021 stackoverflow developer survey.
3. Self-organization
If your surrounded by non-coding colleagues, structuring your daily work is totally up to you. There are no code-reviews or sprints with a group of people that are doing the same kind of stuff like you. This kind of freedom comes with the effort to stay focused and motivated, all by yourself.
I love my job, I love the daily opportunities and the fact that I'm able to persue what ever idea comes to my mind! For me the only drawback is the lacking time of each day. If you're setting up a new project e.g. a webapp, you can get quickly overwhelmed by the mass of possible frameworks/technologies to use. As I'm not backed-up by a team of developers, I don't have the time to try every possible solution. That's why I like to play around with these technologies in my sparetime. Currently it's Angular... an I love it. It's all about structure and coming from C# I like the object-oriented flair of it.
Why I start blogging
But enough about me for my first blog entry. I'm not quite sure where this blog will take me but I sat down for several reasons:
getting into the community
stay up-to-date on trending topics
document & share my journey and learnings
and hopefully I'll end up building a portfolio for myself.
Please feel free to share your thoughts about this post in the comments below or reach out to me. Maybe you're in a similar position like me, if yes, can you relate?
Thanks for reading!
git commit -m "Initial commit to my blog, stay tuned"