“Learning the act might take you a day or a week. Learning the art is what takes the 10,000 hours” - Willie Jackson
If the act of building softwares is software development, this means that a person who builds softwares is a software developer. What then does it take to be a software developer?
As much as the number of software developers in the tech field grows with each passing day, a lot of people have shown apathy towards this challenging yet very lucrative career. This lack of interest (perhaps fear)mostly stems from the perceived ideology that software developers are walking repositories of 0’s and 1’s. I also shared this ideology until I began my journey as software developer.
A career choice as a developer has taught me some invaluable lessons; Being a software developer means you are on a life-long journey of learning (this makes Google a developer’s best friend). Being a software developer is not limited to coding alone, software development is 90% thinking and 10% coding (not a general stats though). Being a software developer makes you a problem solver which involves identifying a problem, analysing possible solutions and adopting a suitable tool to actualise the solution (coding), little wonder developers are often referred to as software engineers. It took my final school project (October 2021) to understand this.
The path to being a software developer is hardly a smooth one, it is very challenging but also very rewarding. To be a software developer, consistency is key. You ought to get your hands dirty with code but first, you have to think!