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David Taing
David Taing

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That's a bit different to Property Management. So why Software Development?

That's a question that I get quite a lot.

My short answer is "it's fun!"

But for my long answer:

I've always been a tech person.

  • Built my first computer when I was 15.
  • Played a ton of games (and probably should have touched more grass and talked to more people).
  • And I was the unofficial IT guy at the first Real Estate.

I had been trying to learn programming for the past 8 years. It was on and off, on and off. And to be quite frank with you, I half-arsed it.

But programming clicked for me back in July 2021.

At the end of each month, I was responsible for emailing the End-of-Month Rental Statements to our landlords. I would have to scan each statement individually, rename each PDF individually and then email each one individually.

All-in-all, this process took 5 hours each month.

I was able to build a small Node.js application which would allow me to batch send emails and have different attachments for the different owners.

With this I would have been able to reduce that time-frame to 1 hour a month.

It was then that I understood the why.

We're solving the problems of our users.

Software engineering is just a means to that end. And one that scales.

Since July 2021, I have:

  • 968 hours in VS Code and
  • 2963 commits on GitHub.
  • Landed a handful of Small Open Source Contributions (4 or 5, looking forward to getting more)

And I have also been:

  • Mentoring beginner programmers at Code.Sydney (a Volunteer Developer Organization)
  • Posting every day on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/teeang/)
  • Frequently going to Meetups

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