A while back, LinkedIn included me in the exclusive group of people who are allowed to have their own blog hosted on LinkedIn 🙂 As such, I got an invite from LinkedIn to start creating my first post. I stared at that email for ages I think (at least a couple of months) before I finally decided to bite the bullet and write my first post on LinkedIn. So having just done that about half an hour ago, I thought I’d take to my own blog now to … well… boast about it! 🙂

This first post deals with something that is very close to my heart — and as such I get annoyed by it 🙂 — which is the creative side of software development. A lot of people assume that us, software engineers are pretty boring, carrying on with jobs which have hardly anything glorious about it. Completely missing out the point that you need a lot of imagination and a creative process is employed by developers to solve the solution given to us.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the original article:

You can read the full article on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140702042949-10344195-wanted-creative-software-engineer.

Then there’s the project admin work: you are of course expected to update your task sheet, provide useful comments and feedback to project managers, or QA peers. You are also expected to write clean code and comments so your other peers, should they need to take over from you, can understand your code easily. You need to also provide valid testing tools for the QA guys so they can test and validate your code. You need to probably spend time in code reviews with your peers validating that your code is solid.

I can go on, as believe it or not, the list of things expected of us developers is huge — but there is one common denominator to all of the above expected of us which you hopefully spotted by now: we are expected to follow rules and procedures. That helps greatly with managing a process, but we forget an interesting aspect in this: us, developers, we CREATE things! We need to imagine things in our head first, probably down to the smaller details, in order to then go ahead and implement all of it! It’s all good having the most sophisticated production line for a car, you will build amazing wheels, and bumpers and bonnets — without that someone who initially imagined all of these in their head and how they are going to work together and why you need an engine, you will never build a car that works.

You can read the full article on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140702042949-10344195-wanted-creative-software-engineer.