Task of college

Overview

This article is written for a task of my college. Its requirement is the following:

Write 1 blog/article about yourself and your goals to become a software developer (front/back end dev, software engineer...etc)

1. Yourself (a bit of your history)
2. Your expectations for this course
3. How was your experience with the course so far (first week)
4. What do you want to achieve after the course?

So, this article will be written accordingly.

1. Myself

Biography

• Graduated from university in 2013. Bachelor of Science in Physics.
• Graduated from graduate school in 2015. Master of Applied Physics.
• Worked at a company for +8 years until 2023.
• Entered Cornerstone College in 2023.

Work as a production engineer

My mission

I have worked at one company for 8 years and 4 months. That company creates equipment for labs and hospitals or creates parts or units for aviation, and other company's equipment. I belonged to one of the departments that is a factory producing electric circuit boards designed by other departments.

In there, my mission is to improve the productivity of my factory. I did a lot of kinds of work. i.e. creation of electrical and mechanical drawings, equipment installation and maintenance, quality management, and so on. I started programming as one of those kinds of work.

How I Learned to Stop Drawing and Love the Programming

In the first and second years of working, I spent most of my time drawing. However, I decided to write a program in my third year. The reason for this decision is the following:

• It took a long time and money
• The department's system is hard to use

Took a long time and money

To get results from drawing, I had to do these processes: designing, drawing, estimating, and ordering. After that process, I had to wait a few weeks to get a finished product or create and assemble it. What's more, the cost is not cheap. Especially for mechanical drawings because the metal is not cheap in the first place and I had to ask other manufacturers to process of metal.

The department's system is hard to use

My department's system had been created by MS Excel and MS Access without any documentation or plan. I think those applications suit a small amount of team but my department has over 300 people. Furthermore, those applications are strictly bound to each other but nobody knows which one is bound to others. And some file sizes are over 1 GB. To get the latest data, I had to copy it from NAS and wait several minutes then check the data that was no longer the latest.

My Projects as a Software Engineer (my title is still production engineer but)

I have joined several projects but it will too long to introduce them here. Therefore, I skip that introduction. I've written about it.

2. My expectations for this course

I haven't learned systematically from others and haven't written programs with others. So, whenever I was designing a system and writing a program, I always asked myself if that was a good choice or if it this not anti-patterns. (I think I made a better choice.)

Therefore, I expect to communicate with other people who are interested in the software and work on projects with them in this course.

3. How was my experience with the course so far (first week)

Actually, I haven't written code yet and the contents are abstract thus I cannot judge whether this course is good or bad. Although I can judge that my teacher is the best! (Yes, I apple-polish my teacher. Joke.) He prepared slides for this class and it's very easy to understand, and he sometimes uses analogy to make use sense. Above all, he taught us that "If you run into a problem when writing a program, you should read official documentation" and "You should study on your own aside from this class". I completely agree with this, I think this is a necessary skill for a software engineer. This is why I wrote, "My teacher is best".
If I could request to college, I would like to ask to deploy plugs to each table.

4. What do you want to achieve after the course?

I don't decide yet but I would like to work in Vancouver for a while as a Software Developer. Furthermore, I prefer Backend to Frontend thus I would like to work as a Backend Developer.