By Erik Gfesser — May 6, 2017

Media Query Source: Part 2

The responses I provided to a media outlet on November 17, 2016:

My responses ended up being included in an article by a small private college in San Diego alongside business owners and other consultants within the software industry. Extent of quote highlighted in orange. Above image from cited article.

Media: Looking for Web Developers to speak on their day-to-day tasks, what skills they learned in the classroom that they use in the real world and talk about their career path.

My responses were broken down as follows:

Media: Talk about your day-to-day tasks.

Gfesser: Tasks can very considerably from day-to-day, due to the nature of being a web developer. However, when working on an agile project using a methodology such as Scrum, every 2-week cycle / iteration of work follows a similar pattern.

The start of each 2-week cycle / iteration typically starts with planning sessions to set goals for the upcoming time period, and ends with deployment of new code, typically corresponding with a walk through for the customer. Additionally, a retrospective is typically held with the development team to review the 2-week time period, and discuss how the development process might be improved in future iterations.

In the interim between the beginning and end of each iteration, time is typically consumed by reviewing and discussing customer requirements, and developing new code to fulfill these requirements. Since the nature of each requirement can be considerably different from other requirements, code changes can be related to new functionality, modified functionality, or fixing issues that have been discovered through testing.

Since agile methodologies typically presume that the development team has all that it needs for a given iteration, it is common to spend time working to learn new technologies before iterations start, but are likely to continue to learn such technologies after iterations start, specifically relating to library specifics provided by these technologies.

Media: What skills did you learn in the classroom that you use in the real world?

Gfesser: Skills specific to a particular technology that are used on the job were not learned in school. While I have taken courses on the web that pertain to a particular technology, most of my learning since leaving school has been done outside structured classes. The skills learned in a typical computer science program in school revolve around concepts that might be applied to multiple technologies, so that students can apply more general concepts when faced with using a new tool.

For example, I took courses on algorithm design in school, but the focus was not the specific language (e.g. Java or Python) that the professor used to implement the algorithms but the logic and flow that is used by the algorithms, even though it was required to pick up specific languages in order to implement the algorithms. Another example is database design. While I took a course on database design in school, the focus was on how data should be structured and stored, rather than on whether a specific vendor database product (e.g. Oracle or SQL Server) was used.

Media: Talk about your career path.

Gfesser: My career started out as a junior developer, and has progressed over time to other roles such as senior developer, development team lead, project lead, and architect. Since I have been a consultant for the bulk of my career, my roles are project based and can change from project to project. Additionally, when working in any of these roles as a consultant it is important to know that much of the work involved is not specific to programming per se, but involves an ecosystem of related activities such as design, architecture, and making recommendations to clients.

See all of my responses to media queries here.

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