Every year, on the 13th of September, the global tech community come together to commemorate #InternationalProgrammersDay. It’s more than just lines of code; it’s a celebration of the exceptional minds that shape our digital world. In honour of this special occasion, some of our tech team share their favourite aspects of being a developer, a project they’re proud of, tools or software they find indispensable and what programming language or technology they are most excited about.
What’s your favourite aspect of being a developer?
Joanne Misquitta, Senior Developer
“As a software developer, my profession offers me the versatility to work across various domains and platforms, allowing me to potentially reach millions of individuals through my work. There’s an indescribable joy in receiving compliments from strangers who appreciate the applications I create. Each day presents something fresh to learn.
Matt Bell, Developer
“I’ve always been a fan of puzzles, and developing is basically just solving one puzzle after the next. Sometimes they can be quite complex and multi-layered, but that’s what makes it so much more rewarding when you finally figure it out. I’m also quite a neat person, so after getting the initial implementation done, I like spending time refactoring the code so it’s as compact, readable, and efficient as I can make it.”
Theo Woodward, Developer
“My favourite part of my role as a developer is the way in which I get to build things every day without having to get my hands dirty or use physical resources! Software engineering really is like building a complex machine, and you can do it all while sitting in your chair, editing it and refining it as much as you like – something you can’t do as easily with physical engineering.”
Tell me about a project you’re really proud of, and what lessons you learned from it?
Chloe Thorne, Developer
“The project I am most proud of currently is my dissertation, an herb recognition app. I decided to use MATLAB to create my image classification model and export it to C++ to use within my ASP.NET API. However, when I started to debug the project, I noticed that the export could not find the required MATLAB libraries. I contacted the MATLAB support team to which they found out this was an issue with their export and later fixed the issue. However, to meet the project’s deadline, I had to produce a workaround. After a long time investigating (about 3 months), I finally came up with the idea to host the classification model locally on my computer and get the API to call that. The lesson I learned from this project is to never give up on something if it’s not working – there will always be a solution out there somewhere, you might just not of thought of it yet.”
Martina Viljoen, Senior Developer
“As a software engineer, what I am proud of is not just writing code but also building relationships with clients and understanding the needs to make their business work. I had the privilege to work on several larger projects, in particular, a logistics solution for the Automotive Industry with a lot of complexity from running production to vehicle service and maintenance at the dealerships. One of the things I have learned when working on a project that directly affects a large number of people is that a small change can have a big impact on everyone’s daily productivity and their customer’s experience.”
What tools or software do you find indispensable in your daily development workflow?
Joanne Misquitta, Senior Developer
“AI tools have become an integral part of my daily routine. They play a pivotal role in streamlining various aspects of life. Predictive analytics, for instance, has proven invaluable in the world of financial trading, bolstering returns while mitigating risks. Moreover, machine learning algorithms work diligently to detect intricate patterns within transaction data, serving as a formidable defence against fraudulent activities, and safeguarding both individuals and organisations from financial losses. AI’s pervasive influence has truly transformed the way we navigate our daily lives.”
Theo Woodward, Developer
“I use the Fork version control client daily and find it an indispensable tool for committing to my work and managing branches. It provides a simple yet powerful UI for managing git repositories, and lets you do many tasks through its UI, which otherwise you’d have to write console commands to do. It has many nice to have features like dark mode, branch map, and merge conflict management. I use it every day and really recommend it.”
Eloise Wood, DevOps Apprentice
“I use Azure DevOps to build CI/CD pipelines as a DevOps Engineer Apprentice – and I find the integration with Visual Studio to be very beneficial when testing pipelines. The CI/CD templates are a great way to build YAML pipelines and to help choose environments for release. ”
What programming language or technology are you most excited about right now, and why?
Matt Bell, Developer
“Right now, I’m enjoying learning about TypeScript – it’s essentially a strongly-typed version of JavaScript, notorious for being extremely mutable which makes it hard to keep track of types and properties. TypeScript comes with settings you can configure to enforce certain rulesets which basically lets you customise it to work the same as something like C#, a language we all know and love (for the most part). The Angular web framework – another library I’m interested in – utilises TypeScript, so it’s a nice change to be working on modular web apps with strongly-typed front-end code.”
Chloe Thorne, Developer
“At the moment, I am very interested in the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. I think it’s amazing how quickly you can interact with their pre-built AI models to get very accurate results, as well as implement ones to your needs.”
Find out more about our talented team at Software Solved.
