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How has your specialty changed throughout your career?

Ben Halpern on April 07, 2022

We're not all just "programmers" — over time we become web devs, lead devs, SREs, etc.

What's your story?

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Alex Lohr
  1. Semi-professional musician (guitar, vocals) and songwriter
  2. Part of an assembly demo crew
  3. Voice actor
  4. Martial arts trainer for kids
  5. Furniture mover + part time IT support
  6. Full stack + security + accessibility + UX design + networks + IT support freelancer
  7. Specialized in front-end, employed
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Sattwik Sahu

Mr Incredible 🔥🔥🔥🔥

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Alex Lohr

Like my grand master used to say: "I'm not better than you, just longer at it."

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Heather Williams

Started off editing textbooks, then learnt to edit technical content (maths and science focused) before moving into software development.

In the software development field I have had experience at most aspects since I work for a small company. This means wearing many hats and getting to find what I really care about.

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leob

Not! Doing essentially the same thing as in the beginning, only better (I hope).

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Jon Randy 🎖️ • Edited

Developer -> Developer

It's always been my speciality over 26 years. Dabbling a bit in other roles here and there as needs be, but still first and foremost a developer

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Jorge Alberto Díaz Orozco (Akiel)

I've being a developer for all my adult life.
This is the only thing I know how to do.

  1. Windows applications developer (Borland Delphi)
  2. Java Developer
  3. Python developer
  4. Linux Developer (Mostly C, C++, Python and bash)
  5. Android Developer
  6. Web developer with Groovy and AngularJS
  7. Software Engineer (A bit of all things but mostly Python, Golang and Docker)
  8. Platform Developer (Golang and Kubernetes)

I get bored easily but I know only one trade

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Raí B. Toffoletto • Edited
  • Computer teacher for adults/elderly (in early 2000s)

The following were concurrent...

  • Professional musician (classic and renaissance focused)
  • Freelancer Web Dev
  • Music Teacher
  • Portuguese Teacher
  • Cleaner
  • Mover
  • Chocolate seller
  • Supermarket cashier
  • Restaurant staff
  • Office helper And etc..

Since 2020:
Web developer. (FE and UX focused)

Hoping to continue as dev. 😁

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Stuart Jones

Over 20 years

  1. Support engineer for HVAC control hard/software
  2. Some JavaScript-based engineering tools
  3. PHP/MySQL web applications
  4. More PHP/MySQL web applications
  5. Qt/C++
  6. Back to PHP
  7. Back to JavaScript
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Joe Mainwaring

I talk about my technology career path in my post How Covid & Cancer Impacted My Career, but to summarize:

  • 2000: Took an apprenticeship role at my local school district when I was a sophomore in High School.
  • 2005: Took a lead role overseeing IT operations for a D1 Collegiate Athletics Program. 15 sports + a half dozen or so supporting departments.
  • 2009: First true FTE role as an IT specialist. Very sysadmin focused.
  • 2011: Started to burn out with IT, began to build engineering skills
  • 2013: Delivered my first iOS app on a contract & took my first engineering role at a FinTech startup.
  • 2014: Started working at HighGround as a mid-level engineer
  • 2016: Promoted to Team Lead of HighGround's mobile product, began to manage both the delivery and the product roadmap.
  • 2018: HighGround gets acquired, I switch from Mobile to Web Engineering with a focus on architecture for the merged product
  • 2020: Promoted to Director of Infrastructure. A lot less coding, and more meetings with vendors and strategic planning.
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K

Over the course 17 years now.

  1. IT support in HR department of a hospital
  2. PHP frontend dev
  3. VBA dev in HR department of a big corp
  4. PHP backend dev
  5. JS frontend dev
  6. JS fullstack dev
  7. JS mobile dev
  8. Freelancing tech blogger (frontend, APIs, security, DevOps, cloud, serverless)
  9. Chief editor

Was quite a ride.

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Pandita

I was a developer that dabbled in design for fun until like, October? November?

Now I'm a mess of BA, Architect, QA Automation Engineer, Designer, Scrum Master, DevOps, Developer and Dog Trainer.

Now dear Universe... when will I get my chance at leadership?! >:VVVVVVVVV throws table

Ah and don't worry about me, I'm not overwhelmed by this. It's been quite natural and I welcome this new learning phase in my career 😂

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Stephanie Handsteiner

-> Freelancer (Dev, UI, UX, SEO, DevOps, ...)
-> Employed (mainly frontend, but technically full-stack)

Between the end of school and going freelance for a few years (while leading a nomad-ish life), I've had a couple of jobs not in IT, although having been trained in IT through school.

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Federico Navarrete

I started coding in El Salvador in VB6 in 2006, but over the years, I moved to .NET to be precise ASP.NET and web development. In 2014, I moved to Poland where I started a new chapter and carried with .NET, but mainly between ASP.NET and WPF with minor work in Azure. The biggest change happened when one of my Team Leaders after commanded me: "Hey, you need to migrate this DB server for the next Monday."

I had no experience doing any migration in my life. The first time was hard if not extremely challenging since I was moving sensitive data, but in the end I suceeded. The following years, I became the migrations experts and started to get involved in moving not only DBs, but entire ecosystems from on-prems to Azure.

Another crazy twist happened in 2018, when I got involved in the RPAs business since no one in my company wanted to do this "dirty" job, but I was open to it. I became the first person working with Automation Anywhere in Poland and started to even train people across the organization, persuading them that building virtual bots was not a bad idea. This brought new businesses and clients to our department.

The most recent change happend in 2020, I was hired in Spain, but my work permit took 5 months to be delivered. When I was hired, I was hired to work with Azure, but life was tricky and during those 5 months many things had changed, when I arrived, my new manager asked me: "Do you know about AWS?" I had no idea about the AWS, so, he entrusted me the migration of new servers from on-prem to AWS using serverless. This was a new intense journey since I moved from coding to leading teams and introducing serverless, cloud native, etc. and several new concepts in a new sector (maybe even the dark side of the force) called AWS.

Nowadays, I am mainly leading migrations to AWS using Cloud Native, but who knows what would be the next twist. Maybe I'd be in New Zealand leading the development of the next industrial revolution.

Thanks for asking.

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Clavin June • Edited
  1. Lab instructor in my uni, with mostly basics of computer science
  2. fullstack on web with Java+React
  3. devops engineer with more YAMLs, shell and Golang
  4. backend infrastructure engineer with mostly Java
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Davit Peradze
  1. Information and Technology teacher at primary school.
  2. Teacher of English language at primary school.
  3. Sales manager (auto parts).
  4. Carpenter Assistant.
  5. Full stack developer (part time, almost 5 years).
  6. Web Project Manager.
  7. Front end development trainer.
  8. Technical SEO consultant (almost 5 years).
  9. QA test analyst.
  10. QA test automation engineer.
  11. QA chapter lead 👈 now I'm here
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Jason Murray • Edited
  • U.S. Navy Submarine Nuclear Mechanic
  • U.S. Navy Nuclear Work Planner/Work Coordinator
  • Call center support ISP customers
  • Call center support enterprise IT
  • General "web programming" gig
  • Full stack web maintaining a "custom cms"
  • IT Helpdesk/workstation/automation support for a school district
  • Full stack OSS development
  • Federal/State/Education OSS Web Apps, full stack
  • Back end/integration engineer, OSS development
  • DevSecOps/Backend Engineer/Engineering Management
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Francesco Borrelli

started of as an hobbyist, wanted to create stuff and share with others, so I created a website with Excel, and then shared it with my peers on USB drives.
Then I discovered HTML JS and CSS. From here on it's a downhill into this huge rabbit hole that is my passion.
From PHP to Node, to Go. Started of building websites and working now on the cloud as a SSE :D.

P.s. during the journey I tried lots of different things such as IoT dev, Security, Mobile dev and many others.
p.p.s. Right now I'm trying to learn how to dev a game (ofc starting from 3d modeling)

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Diner Das

Software engineer -> SRE -> Lead SRE

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Diego (Relatable Code)
  1. Hotel Concierge
  2. Customer Support
  3. Lead Customer Support
  4. Junior Front-end Engineer
  5. Senior Front-end Engineer
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Simon Foster

Started off working as IT support for a small company, progressed to learn about servers, databases and lots more on the sysadmin side before switching sides to become a developer which is what my day job today is.

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Well I'm not officially a developer so there's that, and I work a lot on tooling for other people but otherwise still a frontend expert at heart

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Mario Pereira
  • Fruit picking
  • Barista and cleaner in a disco
  • Construction worker
  • Computer Sales store
  • IT HelpDesk
  • System Administrator
  • Cloud Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer doing backend when needed.
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Tawhid

Digital Artist -> Hardware Guy -> Game Dev -> current self

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Mirza

Developer -> DevOps within 3 years. DevOps/SRE sounds more interesting to me, although I miss backend dev sometimes.