Software Development Career Paths

Software is truly ubiquitous, just look around and you will see just how important it is to our every day lives - in our mobile phones, smart watches, cars, TVs, and all the equipment required in our hospital intensive care units.

There is a place for everyone within software development, you just have to find out what really interests you. I think an very broad initial classification could be business or embedded development. Do you love playing with one or more of the single board computers which have appeared over recent years, such as the Raspberry Pi (TM,  Arduino (TM), Beaglebone (TM), with their associated hardware plug-in adapters and then diving into low level drivers and enabling these boards to sense and interact with their environment ? Or, do love developing websites, WindowsTM or mobile applications, and their associated business layers, and database backends ?  

Of course, you don't have to decide between these fields - you could dabble in both. There are so many excellent further education courses at college or university to choose from, you could start of on a general computing course and specialise later as you find out more.

Alternatively, what key technology trends do you find most interesting - such as AI and Machine Learning, robotics, cyber-security. You only have to search online for such trends, and then dive in and investigate what interests you. A quick search today, revealed the list on the Forbes website (Mar, 2020)  which includes Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, The Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and augmented analytics, Cloud and edge computing, Natural language processing, Voice interfaces and chatbots, Computer vision and facial recognition, Robots and cobots, Autonomous vehicles, Digital platforms (such as Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb), Drones and unmanned aerial vehicles, Cybersecurity and resilience, Quantum computing, and Robotic process automation. What a list, some many fascinating areas, and software is of intrinsic importance in all these fields. 

With the community editions of Visual Studio on Windows, or a GCC with linux, everyone can setup a professional quality development environment for free - so go ahead, dive in, code and play. If you get stuck, well there is a wealth of quality websites with tutorials or information to help you out - such as stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/), and codeproject (https://www.codeproject.com/) being just two quality resources at the tip of the iceberg.

So, having played with development, perhaps studied and passed qualifications, or whilst studying, you will also want to find employment - or perhaps setup your own business. If you take the former path, then in-addition to your coding skills you will also need to practice your interview technique. A great podcast which can help here is by Felienne (2020). 

So, dive in, start coding and have fun !

References

Felienne (2020) 'Episode 412: Sam Gavis-Hughson on Technical Interviews', Software Engineering Radio, [Podcast]. 10 June 2020. Available at https://www.se-radio.net/2020/06/episode-412-sam-gavis-hughson-on-technical-interviews/ (Accessed 22 June 2020)

Marr, B. (2020) These 25 Technology Trends Will Define The Next Decade, Forbes, 20 April 2020 [Online]. Available at

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/04/20/these-25-technology-trends-will-define-the-next-decade/#5fee050029e3 (Accessed 22 June 2020)