How the Software Developer profession has grown
1975, the year when Bill Gates and Paul Allen created the company Microsoft, Steven found himself starting to explore the world of microprocessor assembly language. He has since spent 6 years as a Product Engineer for Cair UK. Coding is important to what we do, as the microprocessor hardware sits there dumb until software breathes life and character into it; coding is creative, you can build stuff and make things happen, and Steven explains why it can be so satisfying.
“There are a few things I love about code. Its flexible nature for one; you take one hardware platform and you can run a huge variety of applications on it: business, scientific, educational, artistic. It is highly customisable too, you can provide the exact features you want, working the way you want it to.
One other point of interest is how the profession of Software Developer has grown. There was no profession as such back when I first started exploring code. They existed but generally only in those companies that had ‘mainframe’ computers. i.e. the large corporates of their day, usually for running pay-roll calculations. But the microprocessor opened up the profession as people, often kids, learned to programme their home computers like the BBC micro and ATARI.
Eventually, as micros proliferated, there was a need for more and more programmers creating all sorts of different applications. The industry was born. And with that birth came standards, methods of best practise, object oriented programming. i.e. Professionalism.
It’s amazing what can be achieved using 1 and 0 and a few rules.”
End.