The life of a software developer is full of challenges since the invention of computer. The expansive dreams of the designers and architects have been turned to reality because of the hard working coders. Starting from the early days of Assembly language to the modern Google’s GO developers, the challenge remains the same.

The Journey of a Developer can be broadly divided into the following categories.

(A) Developer in the College Lab

As an engineering student most of us get the first brush with programming languages (it happened to be C/C++ in my case) right in the first semester. At that moment, dreams tend to dictate our aspiration more than reality. I still remember that our teachers insisted us to focus on learning the working of the built-in functions, and also develop our own customized version.

A healthy competition in the pratical classes started evolving. A strong desire to become the best programmer in the class became the undeclared target. Often, no defined benchmarks were present to evaluate the best programmer.The obtained marks in the exams had the last say.

Still students who could use their own string length function instead of the available one felt very proud of their feat. This part of the career is the  best for any student as they have the liberty to learn anything at their will.

(B) Developer in the Job Race

Now if you see the  trend in the last few years , the selection criteria for the companies have changed. They prefer to select the best coders by arranging hackathons. Now, a smart programmer or should I say, a valued programmer is not the one who can write fancy code or write hundreds of lines of complex code  but is the one who writes less code with fast delivery. Companies are becoming smarter, they are checking the delivery part along with the technical skills.

The hunt for the job can be tiring at times. If someone gets selected in Java and few fail to clear the interview in C/C++, a sudden myth starts developiong that one has to learn Java to get a job. Currently  I have seen a mad rush for the new comers to learn Swift and become a IOS developer. Well that is just a momentary; do not ditch your domain of interest for transitory trends.

(C) Developer Working in the Company

Nowadays, industry is working in Agile mode – so, as a developer we need to think not just to prove our coding skills, but about the timelines of the delivery. As developers, we are naturally tuned to give more importance to logic, algorithms and bug free code, so during our academic years delivery doesn’t feature in our list of priorities.

Now “Delivery” is the leader i.e. in today’s situation – focus is on result. There is less and less focus on ‘How you are developing’ and more on ‘Whether you are delivering right output at needed time’.

You will also experience another frequent problem after joining the industry. You might be hired for Java, but after couple of months you are required to work on Python. Do not say NO.

If you learn Python you won’t forget JAVA. Do not restrict your self from learning the new languages, which are the building blocks for the modern programming world.

The ease to capture the market with hardware or software products have definetly cut down the development time for the developers.Currently Apple is pushing the update almost every month and some of the popular online platforms are pushing 10s of builds every day. We as developers can survive it by slightly changing the attitude  towards programming. We need to look for smart avaible libraries and use them and if needed write a wrapper on top of it.

Today it’s the age of open source. For example ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform), is a wonderful place to search solutions for your problems and also you can submit code to make it a rich resource. I think we as developers need to be smart to use the available resources and be a part of open source movement which is happening all round the globe.

Finally, I would say – If there ever was a need for developers to be Open, Flexible & Agile – it is today. There has never been a better time.