So there I was.

I joked that programming is like the dark side of career paths. Its tempting to do because it looks fun from the outside. It would have been a nice change from pushing paper and excel spreadsheets to vendors about why X does not adhere to standard Y. To be able to go to ‘work’, and that ‘work’ means somewhere near civilisation. The concept is amazingly tempting, yet fraught with risk.

So I started considering a job in software development around October 2014. All I had with me were:

• First year computer science
• Mechatronics engineering (MATLAB and similar)
• Two years of PLC/SCADA/Cicode programming
• 9 months of being stuck on site and poking around with Linux, VPNs, vim, bash

Not too bad considering.

I often see people posting on the /r/cscareerquestions subreddit questions about what is involved in migrating to a career of software development. I’m in the enviable position of having completed that step, and I’ll share my background in this article and will cover my migration to software development in a future post.

My friends know me as someone who is not very loyal. I don’t mean to my girlfriend. I mean to various technology and web stacks. Ever since the advent of node.js, frameworks, tooling and just weird stacks have popped up. Not that I’m complaining. I love reading about new frameworks, languages and development in general.