1. What were you doing before you became a Software Engineer?
Before I became a software engineer, I was a high school teacher— I mostly taught English 12 and a bit of Spanish 1.
2. Where are you currently working and what do you do?
I currently work at Estately, where I work on all parts of the codebase.
3. What’s your favorite part of your job?
I love that at my job I have opportunities to refactor legacy code and opportunities to build new features. I also really appreciate that at Estately, engineers have a strong voice not only about application development, but about design and purpose as well. Our business team and our development team work pretty closely on a daily basis.
4. Describe a typical day in your role.
My day rarely contains any meetings other than a morning standup— we do, however, occasionally get together as a team to discuss long-term objectives and assignments. I’ll spend some time in the morning responding to emails, reviewing open pull requests, and reading our chat channel’s backlog (we have a distributed team, so I have to catch up on the work done while I was asleep). The rest of the day is spent writing code— sometimes alone, sometimes with a pair. And on Wednesdays we all go out for a nice team lunch— engineers, agent liaisons, CEO and CTO.
5. Any advice you have for others looking to enter the tech industry as a programmer.
My concept of what it means to be a programmer evolves all the time— there are so many unique applications with different purposes, written in varied languages and requiring specialized solutions. I’d advise people who are interested in programming to keep all those options in mind. There are myriad careers within the career of programming and constant opportunities to learn, so being open to and excited for new challenges allows new programmers to carve out space for themselves and their passions, and to appreciate that there is *always* more, rather than be overwhelmed by it.