My start to software engineering
My journey into software was far from the typical path. After three years of going to school for baseball and a degree in business administration, I realized that I should probably figure out some kind of meaningful career before it was too late. I knew I needed some kind of hard skill, so I decided to concentrate on the only available course load I could squeeze into my schedule – data science.
This led me into the world of database management, R, and of course, Python. At this time it was all for data manipulation and some machine learning algorithms. I can remember the first time I smashed that green play button on PyCharm and saw ```Hello World``` pop up in my terminal, it was euphoric! Flash forward to the end of my senior year, Pandas Dataframes were my best friend and I was comfortable with a language for the first time.
After graduation, I worked some roles in data analytics, eventually ending up here at Wedgworth's as a data engineer. Wedgworth's is the largest and oldest custom fertilizer blender in the state of Florida. Agriculture is an extremely niche field. Good handling of your immense amounts of data is imperative and often overlooked. Many times in this industry, this sort of thing is outsourced to consultants or contract employees. Wedgworth's was special in that they were putting together a group of in-house, advanced software and tech projects, led by their own VP of Tech, my now boss and mentor, Patrick Altman.
So when I got to Wedgworth, the fact that Patrick was working on these projects as a full time employee opened up a world of possibility for me. There were IoT Projects, API Design Projects, and the biggest one, the complete rebuild of the ERP that the entire Wedgworth operation runs on, now known as Stark.
One day, I went to Patrick and said, "Hey, that stuff you are working on is pretty cool. Do you think you could show me how it works?" He gracefully said yes! And that started me down the path of learning about CS and eventually shifting my focus to work on software projects, contributing to the multiple projects that we have released over the last two years.
The first benefit of doing things in-house that I am describing is a long-winded explanation of opportunity. You give yourself and your team more opportunity for growth when they have more paths of work available for them to passionately pursue. I've seen first hand the benefit of investing in your people and letting them pursue what they are passionate about even if it's rough at first. There were plenty of better options out there for software engineers then me when I first started if Patrick needed extra hands. But because of the willingness to do it with our people, the result is work that is purposeful to me and now an employee that has the tribal knowledge from the inside out of how our technology works, which hopefully benefits the whole team in the long run.
How does this approach help the team as a whole?
To shift focus to the non-engineering team, there is one word that I believe summarizes the benefit to everybody when this kind of mindset is utilized – ownership.
Not coincidentally, one of the first projects that I worked on in my new role was to bring our regulatory services in-house. The major pieces that we were outsourcing was label creation and registration tracking for our products.
Our services at Wedgworth are highly custom, but once our products are completed, the paperwork stays static, so there was no reason why we couldn't just generate paperwork directly inside of our ERP. The first iteration of this solution consisted of very large Vue files for each and every variation of file needed, that the user could just ```cmd+p``` to save or print. I then learned that PDF handling inside of web apps was much more complicated than I expected, and we ended up rolling our own PDF server to serve PDFs to our users in a cleaner way.
That is worth a whole other blog post, but the important part of this story is that in order for me to make fertilizer labels and know what was needed for fertilizer registration across the country, I now found myself studying the ins and outs of the fertilizer industry with the help of the resident experts on the team. Because of this, I had to be more closely tied to the actual core of the business that I was working on and more importantly, tied to the people on our team that were entrusting there years of hard-earned knowledge to put into the app. This puts even the non-engineers at every level of the company in a position where they are playing an active role in the development of the product.
To summarize the second benefit, you and your team are more involved, invested, and care more about the product that you are building. The mindset of "Oh, I told you it wouldn't work", is no longer an option. Everybody is rooting for it to work because it's their name attached to that product, too! You spent hours getting ideas from the 'customer', which in this case is your co-worker, and it's their ideas and work that you are punching into the computer. That's true regardless of who built it, but when you do it together, it's easier to see and helps promote ownership from everybody, not just the builders.
Encouragement and Determination
This post mainly hits on the benefits of homegrown software and technology, but of course, this is not true for everything. We can't all roll our own git (like the one and only Casey Muratori), and sometimes it's worth it to take the risk of US-East-1 shutting down for the day.
However, I do think the benefits of working on that project you didn't think you could do are worth contemplating. If you turn around at the first sign of resistance, you may miss out on a lot of value. It's okay to feel completely lost when working on an entirely new project... I am very familiar with the feeling! Just like in the rest of life, those are the times where the most growth can occur.
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.” (Colossians 3:23-24)
