16-years-experienced, self taught developer/designer/engineer here — currently working with international enterprise/corporate customers as a professional services consultant for a large cloud services provider.
1. I don’t have a formal background in CS, but I have had to learn the industry-standard ways of solving common problems and continuously assessing order of complexity for both systems and code along the way.
2. I started with nothing but a design background and skillset, and I had to learn to supplement it with technical skills at each stage.
3. I really feel like my “success” (which is completely relative btw) is due in part to the time during which I picked up the core development skillset. Back in the early 2000’s there were no mentors around. You couldn’t just stick an evil error message into Google and expect to get the answer to your issue in 20-30 seconds. There was no Stack Overflow (and for a good while, still wouldn’t help).
Sometimes you had to monkey patch the problem. Other times you had to find an alternative route. Sometimes you’d realize that what you faced was a real limitation of the tech you were working with and you’d have to either devote the time to fixing it or give up and switch to something else completely. And yes, that was before you could submit a PR on the Github repo with your patch, so the next release would almost always break your “fixes”.
4. Multi-disciplinary interests and skillset. Having a highly-fungible skillset and being really interested and fascinated about the world around me has contributed immensely to both the technical as well as the professional side of my career and growth. It helps me earn trust quickly with customers, but also provides deep insight when attempting to model a real-world, manual process into a machine — which, in my experience is about 95% of the reason people pay us to do this job.
16-years-experienced, self taught developer/designer/engineer here — currently working with international enterprise/corporate customers as a professional services consultant for a large cloud services provider.
1. I don’t have a formal background in CS, but I have had to learn the industry-standard ways of solving common problems and continuously assessing order of complexity for both systems and code along the way.
2. I started with nothing but a design background and skillset, and I had to learn to supplement it with technical skills at each stage.
3. I really feel like my “success” (which is completely relative btw) is due in part to the time during which I picked up the core development skillset. Back in the early 2000’s there were no mentors around. You couldn’t just stick an evil error message into Google and expect to get the answer to your issue in 20-30 seconds. There was no Stack Overflow (and for a good while, still wouldn’t help).
Sometimes you had to monkey patch the problem. Other times you had to find an alternative route. Sometimes you’d realize that what you faced was a real limitation of the tech you were working with and you’d have to either devote the time to fixing it or give up and switch to something else completely. And yes, that was before you could submit a PR on the Github repo with your patch, so the next release would almost always break your “fixes”.
4. Multi-disciplinary interests and skillset. Having a highly-fungible skillset and being really interested and fascinated about the world around me has contributed immensely to both the technical as well as the professional side of my career and growth. It helps me earn trust quickly with customers, but also provides deep insight when attempting to model a real-world, manual process into a machine — which, in my experience is about 95% of the reason people pay us to do this job.