Does your background make your work unique? 💬

The answer to your question is a definitive YES

We are like writers who put all their lives in the product of their imagination.
For example when you use an Apple product, you can feel that Steve Jobs copied a lot of good things from the Japanese culture.
They are also very Californian, so they have to claim all the time that they revolutionize everything, even if it's by adding ESC on the keyboard.

I live in a polyglot multicultural world and I think my work reflect that in a lot of subtle ways.

I love dancing and even that inform my way of seeing the world
dev.to/jmfayard/what-dancing-tango...

I love your drawings, they make your product different

I'm sure my background will make my work unique. (Currently I'm studying data science). I just hope that background, which is eclectic, will prove useful in my new career.
I got a ...

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I think every person has something unique to bring to the table.

You'd be very surprised to learn how life experiences affects your approach to software.

For example, people that came from an environment of poverty will have a natural tendency towards conservation of resources, be it computing power, data and so on.

Compare this to someone who grew up with one or both parents as software engineers. Two very, very different ways of thinking between the two individuals!

For me the lesson is that we all have our own story, and our stories should be used to help each other out. It makes life so much more interesting to live!

School bus driver, pizza delivery, oil supply driver, office supply delivery, car sales, donut maker, nightclub and wedding DJ, radio DJ, ski instructor... that's just jobs I did before going into development professionally.. hobbies etc are a whole other bag of randomness.

I've been playing rugby all my life and I firmly say yes!
Rugby taught me a lot about team working, decision making, crise management, constant improvement, dealing with failures.
As a developer, I cannot even count how many times this saved me at work. And this is true even for tech stuff, not only with people management.

Your artwork is fabulous, I love it ❤️

I'm so glad you posted this. I have always thought that my particular background in the food and hospitality industry have given me tremendous insight into building applications that truly resonate, and are useful to every user.

I also possess the soft skills that allow me to really communicate with business users and my team. Great post.

I'm like a broken record on having a wide background, that's like my #1 advice to any developer.

This weekend I found a YouTube channel of a guy bragging he got a job at Google after just 6 months of bootcamp. But when you listen to what he did, he went through a lot of STEM majors. That's what makes a good developer, a wide toolbox you can use to solve your issues with an open mind.

Myself I studied in an area totally different of programming because I felt that just programming was suffocating. Then I worked in marketing (without any technical component). And now I'm quite happy about this because I know a lot of people that I wouldn't know otherwise and I'm able to solve most of my difficult problems using something from my background.

I come from a STEM background. I'm finishing a PhD in Theoretical Physics and transitioning into tech. I have a very analytical mind and like to break stuff apart conceptually, analyze it, understand how the pieces are related to each other and put it all back together.

So, I find easier to reason in terms of structure, processes and invariants. That definitely has shaped the way I see software. In particular, it has lead me functional programming, which I really like.

There are analogies between programming and physics which I find really useful. For example, thinking about invariants in code is very similar to the use of conservation laws (such as conservation of energy) to understand the physical systems. In both cases, you have rules that don't
fully specify the behavior of your system, but constrain it in ways that allow you to learn things about it with less effort than would be required by a complete analysis.

I read a lot as a child which helped. Also managed to escape a bit of a cult and that experience shapes you in so many ways.

Work experience in corporate Telecom, higher education, and Federal gov't are all defining factors for my outlook in life and technical experience, Paula 👋🏼😌

I was in environmental Sciences, and still regularly an activist in ecology, which makes me care about the energy use by my page, making me trying to improve the efficiency of my code constantly. The problem with the energy used by data center and IT makes me feel anxious.
I also used to be in architecture, I was lie you searching for the way to create. I actually tried project management and business analyst before coding. It gives me a good view of the business part of the project, not only the technical part.

Absolutely! I think the best ideas come to those who are curious and draw inspiration from a mix of divergent experiences. My background includes a brief stint in 3-D animation to starting and operating a specialty grocery store, for example. (!) I think if you can harness curiosity, a willingness to experiment, and continue learning you are more resilient and creative.

I think you should have had picked the front-end field, as your art is amazing.

I have a background in Mechanical Engineering... A place where many (most) dispise code. For some reason I was always the odd duck that did EVERYTHING in code. I would do my homework in matlab... At test time I would script the solutions on my TI calculator (from scratch nothing brought in separately) rather than typing commands in one at a time so that I could review my work before running it. I would even program my 3d models to be driven by spreadsheets of variants we wanted to try.

Now I work as a Data Scientist for a very heavily mechanical company, my Mechanical background gives me an understanding of our product that others do not have. In part this is because I spent my first 5 years deep on the ME side of the fence.

Programming is an odd thing. Sometimes I wonder if it's actually a dysfunction that makes us able to sit in front of a screen and focus intensely on a problem for hours on end, often without much human interaction. Not very many people would be up for that.

I certainly have a mild obsessive streak, a monk-like ability to focus, a tendency to get lost in ideas or developing skills... I also know a few bright coders I've worked with were somewhere on the autism spectrum, and that seemed to somehow make them very well suited for the job, but in a different way.

I suspect patterns like these are fairly common. I'm sure there are more.

Whatever it is for each of us that makes the magic happen, it tends to come with quirks. I suppose I've found a niche for myself as someone who is a good developer and understands introverts and extroverts and likes quirky people (because I feel like I am somehow all three of those...), but who is also good at talking to people and can navigate the business side.

Well, whatever it is, it's working for us. :)

Completely agree! And the tech industry could definitely use more people skills :)

I was an aircraft mechanic for a few years and that's probably why I'm neurotic about proper exception handling.

Yes, It helped a lot in my blockchain & writing career.