From the beginning...
From the beginning...
I started working with web based development and design when I was 16. I started out working mainly with graphic design and then moving more towards web development as I got closer to heading off to university.
In 2005 I got my bachelors degree from McGill University in Computer Science. I had done quite a bit of freelance work with the web while I was in school, but I wasn’t really considering it as a career at the time. I thought it would be smart to become a “developer” rather than a “web developer”, so when I graduated I started working for a pretty big company coding in C# on .NET. It didn’t take me long to realize that I don’t think the way that ‘versioned’ software developers think. Added to that, this was my first experience working with a big company. I had no control over our shipped product, I was just a cog in a big (inefficient) machine. I realized that I had not become a “developer” at all, but a “programmer”. You may be thinking that there is no difference between the two, so let me clarify my point. I was once told, “a software developer is like a poet or a painter. They all start with a blank piece of paper and their only limit is their imagination”. I find this very true. As a software developer you are dealing directly with a client and you are working together with them to solve their problems in the best way possible. By intimately understanding the clients needs you have more freedom to be creative and build an elegant solution. On the flip side, as a programmer you have very little freedom. You are given a strict set of specifications that need to be implemented and your job is to build it. The problem is, most of the time this set of specifications has gone through about 6 levels of documentation, from a high level estimate all the way down to the technical spec document that you were handed. The client is often only consulted for the first half of that documentation process, so it is very possible that right from the beginning you are not even building what the client needs. Of course, when the client is not happy with the end result, the programmer takes all the flak. Being a very entrepreneurial person, this setting really was not working out for me. I began looking into the web environment again because I had always enjoyed working in that field. In my research to get caught up with all the new happenings in this industry I realized that my year and a half away from web development had put me way behind. I knew right away that I was in the wrong industry and started taking steps to correct my previous decisions.
Update: I have quit my job and started working for a small company as a web developer and it has been amazing. I work too much now days, but I couldn’t be happier…
