My Journey to Software Developer

My path to software development has not necessarily been the most strait of lines. It has been a ride, one which I pray marches forward as well as it has. I wanted to share my career journey to this point and some lessons along the way. Not only is this a narrative for self-reflection, but I hope a lesson that can inspire others in their journeys.

To keep this post from turning into a novel, I would like to look at my career thus far on how programming has left a consistent impact on my career progression.

College

College was certainly a time period of significant change. Beyond the obvious changes that come with moving away from parents for the first time, there is a major life decision that needs to be made: “what do I want to do for the rest of my life?” This was a difficult one for me... I knew a little about computers, but nothing beyond a high school class on Excel and Photoshop. But what I did know, I found interesting enough to declare a computer science and business major at Augustana University, Augustana College back in my day! Computer Science classes were difficult, but I found that rush that many come to find when building software. That hit of dopamine when you finally get a code to compile, followed by the immediate brick wall when the output is not what you expected. This constant tennis match of success and failure was something I had not quite experienced before.

Throughout my time at Augie, I continued forward with programming classes, even though I eventually dropped the computer science major for a computer information systems major. The primary reason being, ashamedly, that I found computer science III’s difficulty greater than the effort I was willing to put into it. At the same time, I found marketing interesting and decided I wanted to go more into that direction. Who knows how this decision would have impacted where I am today, but it is something I think about from time to time. Even the thought of returning to college to finally get the CS degree has not been completely ruled out.

Early Career

Upon graduation from college, I started my career at a local advertising agency called Lawrence and Schiller. I interned as a Digital Strategist, which mostly consisted of project management type work for website design and development. I found myself more interested in the development side of work than the actual marketing side during my 9 months with the agency. I wanted to learn more from the developers I was working with. I would often shadow them in order to see what programming in the “real world” looked like.

After the internship, I moved to a software development organization called Omnitech. I learned a lot during my time in sales at Omnitech. I learned a lot about technology, business, people, and myself. I could write a lot about some of the things I learned at Omnitech, possibly another post coming soon. To keep things focused, I found myself gravitating to the developers of Omnitech and asking them questions about technology and the things they were working on. The tug of programming was still there.

Gaining Steam

Zuercher Technologies was the place to work in Sioux Falls if you wanted to work in tech, at least that is how I saw it. The founder, Michael Zuercher, was someone who had piqued my interest for years. The company that he built was fascinating to me, as a person who loved learning about both technology and entrepreneurship. After applying for several positions with the company, all of which ended in a “no”, I was given a shot by a great data conversion manager, Mike Oppelt. As a data conversion analyst, it was my job to shape the data from a public safety agency’s legacy software system into a format that would work with their new Zuercher software. Instead of making sales calls and working with people, my job was writing SQL and working with databases. This was my real taste of professional technical work. Since I was very much on an island of sorts because of the product I was working on, I was given a lot of flexibility to make the process my own, including working with Python to build tools and scripts to make our conversions faster and better. That programming tug was in full force here as I found that this scripting and tool development was my favorite part of the job.

Over a year into my time at Zuercher, the company merged with another public safety software provider and we became CentralSquare Technologies (CST). That same manager that brought me on as a data conversion analyst asked me to be manager of a data conversion team. Business and leadership was something I had wanted since college, and my chance had come. Honestly, this was faster than I had originally thought, but I was ready for the challenge. I had a great team of data conversion professionals and we did great work during my time as a manager. I learned even more during this time because of the quality of my team and leaders I worked with every day. However, that programmer tug would not go away so easily.

2 years of management passed, and I was ready to get into the development space. But, I didn’t exactly take the next step most people would think to take. Instead of transferring into a developer role at CentralSquare, I transferred into a manager of a development team. I learned more during those first few months than I ever had. I needed to write down words and phrases as they were stated during meetings, so I could go back later and find out what was being said. At one point I had over 150 terms and phrases that I had researched. I learned so much during my time managing the team of developers, but there was still something I needed to do. I needed to prove that I could be a competent developer, with my hands actually building the software.

During my time as a manger, I was fortunate enough to be able take a few user stories (work items) from time to time and put my self-taught learning to professional practice. I am convinced that these efforts are what brought me to even have a chance at getting into FTI, where I currently work. Since I had worked in Angular at CST and FTI needed an Angular developer, I got lucky. Luck certainly played a role in a lot of my past experiences, but even more so, it was from the people who took a chance on me. I am very grateful for those who took a chance on someone with little or no experience in the field I was applying for!

Final Thoughts

As mentioned at the beginning, this career journey hasn’t been the stereotypical linear one. The interesting bit across the entire journey has been that programming has popped up throughout each step along the way. I continued to learn more about programming in my spare time at each and every step. Codecademy, Pluralsight, YouTube, books, and GitHub are all great resources for those who want to get into programming. You do not need a special degree or a bootcamp, as long as you have the discipline to put in the effort. Having said that, you also need the hunger to learn and the willingness to get knocked down. A mentor of mine recently stated that you will certainly be successful if you continue to strive towards topics that interest you, shout out to Jeff Beard! This statement connects with me the longer I think about it. To be good at something, you have to put the work in. In order to put the work in, you have to have some desire to want to learn more about it, otherwise, you will certainly burn out. Pure willpower can only get you so far. That does not mean that things won’t suck sometimes, every job/position/role has some shitty parts... but if you can get through the shitty parts, you know you found something special.

As for me, I am not completely sure what the next career step looks like (for the first time in a long time). There is a good chance that I get into management/leadership again, since I enjoy learning more about those topics. On the other hand, I like being in that “flow” state of development. Stay tuned and stay determined!