At 40 years old, it feels weird to finally get around to writing your first ever blog post.
Since it’s the first entry, let’s make it a sort of ‘about me’ kind of post.
First things first, my legal name is Michał, but Michael will do just fine. At the day of this post I am an employee of a well-established software house in central Europe, and I’ve been creating and maintaining applications for the Apple ecosystem on their behalf for various customers for the last five years or so.
Even though I got my first computer when I was in first grade (an Atari 800XL, oldschool stuff), the real start of my IT journey was probably somewhere in my later years of primary school, when me and a handful of nerds living in a block of flats I grew up in, learned about LAN and decided to put together a local network of our own, literally throwing BNC cables from window to window. This gave us an instant messenger we could use, as well as ability to play games like the first two installments of Quake, Starcraft and others. Good times.
My first actual job in IT however came round when I was about 30 years old, when it came to me that working as a bartender in an underground night club might not be a lifelong endeavour worth chasing. I got hired in my first corporate job, as I already knew enough about networking from years of personal experience, and my command of English language was pretty awesome (mainly thanks to MMOs like World of Warcraft and EVE Online, as I was a huge MMO buff ever since DSL internet connections became commonplace where I live).
The job was nothing to write home about, as me and my team were literal human copy-paste machines (copying data from one ticketing system to another as they appear), outsourced to a customer willing to pay for a team of ~12 people to do something I now know could have been done with a simple script. I actually figured it out about a month in, where I got to know AutoHotkey and my shifts became long grind sessions for my WoW characters, as AutoHotkey was doing most of the work for me.
After a few promotions and getting to do things increasingly more difficult to automate, or in other words having to do more process management / soft skill focused work, I started considering options. As I was a Mac user ever since when white unibody macbooks were a thing, trying to dabble in iOS development was a natural thing to do (I was never an actual Apple fanboy, I just happened to dabble in music production and Apple’s Core Audio was miles ahead ASIO4ALL back then). Primarily, Objective-C’s lovely syntax successfully discouraged me from proceeding, but when I saw the news of Apple coming up with an alternative language, I decided to give it a go.
Fast forward about six months and several iOS development tutorials, I started looking around my first job as a software engineer. After a few bombed interviews, I landed myself my first job.
Even though I am grateful for giving me a chance, I can now tell why they couldn’t find a suitable person and just hired some dude with no experience, who’s only project on GitHub was a Pokedex app written with ample help of an online tutorial. Their previous iOS dev just split, vanished into thin air, leaving behind a project that wouldn’t even compile. A tangled mess of weird code and tons of third party dependencies, a lot of them not updated for a long time. My first task was to try and fix it so that it at least builds when pulled from the repo, which I’ve done within the first week or two. It was about the time Swift 2 came round, and all the lovely breaking changes with it. So, my second task was to bring it up to date with Swift 2 (to this day I don’t understand why would they want that) and this was the time I started realizing how unprepared I was for the task at hand. Despite trying my best, I just couldn’t figure out how to make it all work so I proposed rewriting it all again without using so many dependencies, in hindsight an even more daunting task. Needless to say, I never really delivered the app and feeling they would scrap the iOS app project entirely, I started looking for other junior-level iOS developer roles. I found one pretty quickly, and found out my gut feeling was right as they scrapped the app right as I told them I was quitting.
This is how I got to working for my current employer.
I’ve never been a “project hopper”. The first project I joined, an enterprise suite of mobile apps for Android and iOS, I worked on for nearly five years until the customer decided to start phasing it out. Then, after a short stint for a startup customer that ultimately wrapped up, I ended up in a GIS project for a Dutch customer, which is really a world apart from what I’ve been doing for the last five years in terms of complexity, code quality and technologies used in equal measure. It is also easily the most challenging project I’ve worked on thus far.
Thing is, I’m recently itching to rebrand myself and join my operations skills I gathered in the early years of my IT career with developer skills honed in recent years, but that’s a topic for a separate post, I feel.
So there you have it, my journey in a rather lengthy nutshell. If you made it this far, I sincerely appreciate your attention. I suppose it was not as boring as I feel it might have been, after all.
Now, time to finish my coffee and get back to coding. Ronin out.