What it’s like to be a Software Engineer
A short story exposing the nature of software engineering
I have been working as a professional software engineer for just around 4 years as I write this article. I love it. There are always new challenges and technologies which really keep me on my toes. Going through university I had this grand idea of what being a software engineer would be like. My vision involved sitting at a whiteboard solving difficult algorithm problems while sipping coffee with my peers. While that may be the case sometimes, here is a story to show what software engineering is really like.
3 Months to Add Nickname
For the last three months I have been working on a project for our business. I was asked to add a nickname feature to our software. Makes enough sense. Much of what we do involves interacting with our customers and many people use nicknames instead of their real names. For example, someone named Robert may go by Bob. We want to make sure we call him Bob but if we charge his card we need to keep Robert on file because that is his legal name.
Here is the break out of how something as little as adding a nickname turned into a three month project.
