It's great being a developer

[davetherave2]

I have been working as a developer professionally now for a little over 6 years.

During that time I have learnt so much and with my recent transition (talking last 12 months) to .net mvc I was thinking to myself "how great it is to be a developer"

My personal journey from pure winforms, via webforms and now to mvc has been haphazard at best, chaotic at worst

Although the transition from webforms to mvc was painful it has really been in the last 6 months that I have got to grip with it and has culminated in developing sites which I could have only dreamed of 12 months or more ago.

Over the last month I have been rebuilding a site I started as my first mvc site and although I have invested some serious hours I have noticed not only a marked improvement in the cosemtics but also my general development and understanding of core principals.

Plus those mini wins of mastering things that seeming beyond my technical skill has shown me that I don't think I would enjoy a different job as much as I do building software.

As an example I have spent the weekend (about 14 hours) building an import routine that takes an excel spreadsheet with 161 columns of data and 1000 rows of data that is able to update a database on azure.

This would have seemed beyond my means a few months ago but it is so nice to get that feeling that after initial testing only 2 minor bugs were found with this complete routine.

As I have always seen my job as my hobby that I get paid for I don't think there has ever been a better time to be a developer.

Can't wait to see what I am creating in the next 12 months.

 

[davetherave2]

You talk about Excel and databases, surely there are loads of examples on the net, I am not being sarcastic, rather trying to get an idea of why one would struggle when, as I said, there must be loads of reference and examples. Or were you solely using say MSDN as reference and doing as much from a raw base as possible?

I've done excel creation before but very basic.

In the solution I have provided I have had to extract, cleanse and correct the data and then populate my database.

I have only recently started to embrace the ORM/EF based world and although part of me has missed building stored procedures to build the relationships of the data that I have imported it is so easy to go from my main object and then build everything around it and let the ORM technology populate the system for me.

Next step for me will be to move to a more code first approach but baby steps in this brave new world.

I gave the import as one example but getting to grips with the modern web has been an uphill battle in some respects coming from a webforms background where there is that sense of hiding the pure html from you.

I've used ExcelDataReader from codeplex as my preferred excel reading solution but then everything from that point on has been my own code and it's one of those tasks which I hate due to the amount of data corrections I have had to do in the past with reading from excel to ensure data is coming in as expected.

There are probably more interesting examples to give but that is the one I am working on currently and is great to have the amount of time invested provide an almost 100% working solution with no unit tests built.

 

[davetherave2]

Like most professions, the people are where the problems start

Computers do what you tell them to. People, inconsiderately, have an opinion and mind of their own.

Sometimes it is frustrating with people but at times it is also a chance to educate them in the dark arts of development.

I work with a lot of non-techies in the company and I enjoy having their input as much as having my own ideas and theories on how to provide a solution.

I do think the world of non-developers is a few years behind us developers in understanding what is possible and the time it takes to develop. With all the modern frameworks it does seem we are hitting a level of abstraction that the web is now more accessible to people getting into this industry.

Although I have found it challenging at times it is a fun adventure and no two days are ever the same and finding a new technique or a different way of solving a problem is fun.

If there was no such thing as a software developer I don't know what I would do.

 

[davetherave2]

I know what you mean in terms of the satisfaction of getting something to work, particularly if it's something that's really got your interest. But personally, after nearly 12 years doing this for a living, I find it impossible to find the drive to learn new things like MVC or EF, or adapt to the latest IDE (which probably gives you an indication of how long it's been). More often than not I'm of the opinion that what I know already works great, it's fast to write and fast to run, so why do I need to waste my time learning yet another way of doing essentially the same thing? I suppose I've become a bit of a nine-to-five'er.

So that's why I'm getting more involved with IT and operations. Something a little different and quite interesting, but still relevant to the applications I build and the team I work with.

It has taken me a good 6 months to get my head around the EF (Telerik's DataAccess being my preferred ORM tech) world. Still finding my feet with it at the moment so am still doing the database work behind the scenes and then updating my model used in the ORM from this. So next for me is to really get to grips with the code first approach and not have to worry about the database side of things too much.

I am still of the mind that at times maybe doing some crafted sql is better than relying on the ORM framework to do all the tasks but I guess that's because I enjoying writing SQL (is that weird?)
I also enjoyed writing my only little DAL libraries which worked but were a bit complicated to maintain so moving to ORM has saved me a lot of time and effort in trying to maintain these and debug stored procedures.


To me there seems to have been an explosion of front end technologies over the last 12 months (it may be longer but I have only become aware of them recently) so it does seem overwhelming at times. I am just glad that I am sticking with a couple of technologies/ frameworks that have helped me understand the new technologies and has allowed me to develop some cool things (well I think they are)

I just need to get my head around DI and the new Async/Await pattern in .Net and then I think I can convert some processes into more responsive products.

Not to mention the fact that I am still getting my head around all this javascript/jquery business (I think MS shielded us webform developers a bit too much from this)

I just can't wait to see what I am building in the next 12 months and then plan what to learn during this time and beyond.

 

[davetherave2]

In the 20+ years I've been a developer my most said/thought phrase is "This job would be so much easier without users"

I think I have said this a couple of times but I think this again is down to lack of education/ understanding of how complex building software can be.

Users are ever demanding and it seems to be getting worse. On the other hand from their point of view it is difficult to say what they want without seeing something tangible and it's not until they use a piece of software that they find it works or doesn't work.

WARNING!
Maybe a general sweeping statement here and not meant to offend anyone.

A lot of problems I think are caused by developers building software that satisfy their ego rather than what the "client"/user requires and I suspect a lot of software implement is done as an on the job training exercise to try and use that new piece of tech that has been learnt regardless of it is suitable or not. I've been guilty of this in the past during my career where I have used something new that I knew wasn't entirely suitable but I wanted to use it because it had the cool or wow factor.

I still maintain that being a developer is an awesome job and I can't wait to see how technology progresses over the next couple of years. It's amazing to think that less than 15 years ago most people probably didn't own a pc and the web was a bland and difficult place to navigate to now having portable devices that are uber fast, internet speeds that we could have only dreamed of and the feature rich web that was promised back in the early 2000's.

 

[davetherave2]

People make profitable careers out of the people bit of development. Entire professions. It's never going away and is way, way more complex (and less snotty) than "developer ego".

I agree with the sentiment here. It is just in my experience and the developer's that I have worked with in the past has led me to the conclusion that I have, I have fallen foul of some of these traits in my career and paid the price for doing it. I guess I used "developer ego" as a kind of catch all (probably incorrectly but it was the first thing that came to mind).