22 Hot Career Choices or How to be Successful in your chosen career path Chapter 2 Becoming a Software Developer

Chapter 2: The Path to Success: Becoming a Software Developer

In today's fast-paced digital world, software development has emerged as one of the most dynamic and sought-after professions. The demand for skilled software developers continues to rise as technology infiltrates every aspect of our lives.

Whether you're a seasoned coder or a novice just starting out, the journey to becoming a successful software developer is an exciting and rewarding one. In this chapter, we'll explore the key steps and strategies to help you navigate this path and achieve your goals.

1. Cultivate a Passion for Learning

Software development is a field that is constantly evolving. New languages, frameworks, and technologies emerge regularly, making it crucial for developers to stay updated with the latest trends and advancements. Cultivating a passion for learning is essential for success in this field. Embrace every opportunity to expand your knowledge and skills, whether it's through online tutorials, books, courses, or hands-on projects. Stay curious, ask questions, and never stop exploring new ideas and concepts.

2. Master the Fundamentals

Before diving into advanced topics or specialised areas of software development, it's essential to master the fundamentals. This includes understanding programming languages, data structures, algorithms, and software design principles. Solidify your foundation by practicing coding regularly and solving problems on platforms like LeetCode, HackerRank, or CodeSignal. By honing your skills in these fundamental areas, you'll build a strong framework upon which to develop more complex solutions.

3. Build a Diverse Skill Set

Successful software developers possess a diverse skill set that extends beyond coding. While technical proficiency is undoubtedly important, soft skills such as communication, teamwork, problem-solving, and time management are equally valuable. Cultivate these skills through collaboration on group projects, participating in coding competitions, and seeking feedback from peers and mentors. Remember that software development is not just about writing code; it's about solving problems and creating solutions that meet the needs of users.

4. Embrace Continuous Improvement

The software development landscape is dynamic and ever-changing, requiring developers to adapt and evolve continuously. Embrace a growth mindset and be open to feedback and constructive criticism. Seek out mentorship opportunities, attend conferences, and participate in community events to expand your knowledge and network with other professionals in the field. Set goals for yourself and strive for continuous improvement in both your technical skills and personal development.

5. Build a Strong Portfolio

As you progress in your software development journey, building a strong portfolio of projects is essential for showcasing your skills and expertise to potential employers or clients. Work on a variety of projects that demonstrate your ability to solve real-world problems and showcase your creativity and innovation. Whether it's developing a mobile app, contributing to open-source projects, or building your own software product, each project you undertake adds value to your portfolio and enhances your credibility as a developer.

6. Stay Agile and Adapt

In the fast-paced world of software development, agility is key to success. Embrace agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban, which emphasize iterative development, collaboration, and adaptability. Be prepared to pivot quickly in response to changing requirements or feedback from stakeholders. Keep an open mind and be willing to experiment with new technologies and approaches to find the most effective solutions.

7. Network and Engage with the Community

Networking is an essential aspect of building a successful career in software development. Engage with the developer community through online forums, social media, meetups, and conferences. Connect with professionals in your field, share knowledge and insights, and seek out mentorship opportunities. Building a strong professional network can open doors to new opportunities, collaborations, and career growth.

8. Never Stop Innovating

Software development is a field driven by innovation and creativity. Stay curious and keep exploring new ideas, technologies, and trends. Challenge yourself to think outside the box and push the boundaries of what's possible. Whether it's developing cutting-edge applications, contributing to groundbreaking research, or launching your own startup, never stop striving for innovation and excellence in everything you do.

In conclusion, becoming a successful software developer requires dedication, continuous learning, and a willingness to adapt to change. By mastering the fundamentals, building a diverse skill set, embracing continuous improvement, and staying agile and innovative, you can chart a course towards a fulfilling and rewarding career in software development. So, roll up your sleeves, sharpen your skills, and embark on the exciting journey ahead. The possibilities are endless, and the future is yours to create.

aPriori expands enterprise capabilities with latest release of its Product Cost Management platform

-Increases ROI for discrete manufacturers in Europe and North America with new capabilities for costing plastics components, increased throughput and cross-organisation cost management-

aPriori, a provider of product cost management software solutions, today announced the general availability of the latest release of its software platform, aPriori 2012r1.

aPriori 2012r1 offers new capabilities and enhancements that expand the platform’s cost optimisation functionality with new baseline processes for manufacturers in automotive, consumer products, industrial equipment and medical equipment. The release also extends aPriori’s enterprise architecture, providing a common consistent view of product costs across an organisation and supporting new international costing capabilities. As a result, discrete manufacturers are able to expand their product cost management efforts to new product lines and plants, improve decision-making in product design, and speed time to market for new products and parts.

aPriori’s Product Cost Management software platform is a flexible and powerful costing engine. It is able to quickly and precisely determine the cost of a part or product by automatically pulling geometric and feature information from a computer-aided design (CAD) model and leveraging its intelligent cost models to determine reasonable default inputs once the user has selected the manufacturing process, materials and the factory or region where it will be produced. As a product evolves through the development lifecycle, users have the ability to refine the cost by providing detailed inputs and overriding defaults to create a should-cost for negotiation or a manufacturing estimate.

aPriori is used by designers, manufacturing engineers, cost engineers, sourcing professionals and suppliers to attack cost at the point of origin. As design changes are made, or new product specs are introduced, aPriori automatically reassesses and provides an updated product cost quickly and easily. Using this new level of cost knowledge, companies can make more informed design and production decisions and significantly reduce product costs throughout the entire product lifecycle.

"An enterprise approach to product cost management expands the cost savings impact from a single department or project to the entire product organisation,” said Julie Driscoll, vice president of Marketing Strategy and Product Management for aPriori. “This enables employees in every role, on every project to estimate, track and optimise costs as appropriate in their roles. In this latest release, aPriori continues to help our clients realise this vision with expanded costing processes, increased global deployment capabilities and integration with other key business systems that use costs and provide costing inputs.”


Key New Capabilities in aPriori’s 2012r1 Product Cost Management Platform
Expanded Costing of Plastics Components - In response to demand from companies in automotive, consumer products, industrial equipment and medical equipment, aPriori 2012r1 significantly expands its ability to cost plastics components, including both piece parts and tooling costs. This enables users to cost entire products and examine the cost differences between plastic processes such as RIM or injection molding. New baseline cost models in aPriori 2012r1 include:

• Thermoforming - including drape forming and vacuum forming, allows customers to cost production and tooling costs for parts made from heavy gauge sheet plastic such as fender wells and interior door panels. aPriori users can also examine trade-offs between different manufacturing processes earlier in the product lifecycle.

• Structural Foam Molding - supports costing larger, thicker parts such as boxes, palettes and components in child safety seats.

• Reaction Injection Molding (RIM) - supports costing, detailed
components of varying size that may have a high-quality surface finish.

Cross-System Cost Integration - Enterprises are continuously encountering cost information isolated in disparate systems, with the need to reconcile information and push data into their system of record. With aPriori 2012r1, users have the ability to run aPriori from a command line prompt, auto-scheduling the generation of output files to feed costs to downstream systems and reports for users and managers on an ongoing basis. This enables manufacturers to easily disseminate cost information across their organisations and provides a systematic, consistent view of cost.

Internationalisation Infrastructure - With its successful expansion into Europe in the last year, and the increasing number of global enterprise deployments of its cost management platform, aPriori has added new internationalisation infrastructure to its latest version. aPriori 2012r1 extends its global portfolio of regional Virtual Production Environments (VPEs) to include Germany and the United Kingdom. These are data libraries that provide starting points for regional, ‘should-cost’ estimating. It also supports the localisation of the system for different regional languages and user preferences (e.g., the ability to view data in metric or imperial units). A German language version of aPriori will be available in May 2012.

Automated Bulk Analysis for Increased Throughput - Cost engineering groups can now set up and schedule a batch cost analysis of hundreds or thousands of parts at a time. This automated capability enables users to cost many more products and parts while also leaving more time to focus on a short list of exceptions and components that can deliver the highest value in cost savings.

Easy Cost Data Re-Use - aPriori’s latest release also adds the ability to copy settings from one-component to another. This enables users to reuse existing cost data as design components change names and part numbers throughout their lifecycle.

Myles Peyton, managing director, Northern Europe for aPriori said: “Real cost competency requires cross-organisation visibility into product costs and the ability to understand cost drivers at a detailed level. We continue to deliver on our vision of enterprise-wide cost management by expanding costing capabilities for plastics components and providing a common platform and view of product costs across disparate systems. This enables users to disseminate cost information across the organisation and develop a systematic and disciplined approach to product cost reduction.”

For more information on aPriori 2012r1, visit http://www.apriori.com/apriori-2012-r1.htm

FACTFILE:
aPriori software and services generate hard-dollar product cost savings for discrete manufacturing and product innovation companies. Using aPriori’s real-time product cost assessments, employees in engineering, sourcing and manufacturing make more-informed decisions that drive costs out of products pre- and post-production. With aPriori, manufacturers launch products at cost targets, maximise savings in re-work projects and never overpay for sourced parts.

To learn more about aPriori and its product cost management solutions and services, visit www.apriori.com. To see an overview demonstration of aPriori, click here.

aPriori and aPriori Technologies are registered trademarks of aPriori Technologies Inc. All other trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks belong to their respective holders.

m-hance enhances management team

Amanda Grant, m-hance

m-hance, one of the fastest growing suppliers of business software solutions to mid-sized organisations, today announces that Amanda Grant is joining its senior management team as Market Development Director.

Amanda joins m-hance after 13 years with a large software author where she was Market Development Manager and will report to CEO Mark Thompson.

Amanda’s key responsibility will be to drive m-hance’s innovative approach to product development and expand its range of intellectual property (IP) solutions within its vertical market sectors.

Mark Thompson, CEO of m-hance, comments, " This is a significant appointment which underpins our vertical market strategy. Amanda will be the key interface between our market research and new product development teams to drive an expanding range of m-hance’s own IP solutions to meet specific organisational need. "With her wealth of business software experience and excellent pre-sales and training skills, we are delighted that Amanda is joining us" at an especially exciting time for the company. "

Thompson adds, “This appointment reaffirms our intention to establish m-hance as a leading innovator of business software and work closely in partnership with our existing and new customers to develop solutions tailored to their exact requirements.”

m-hance recently unified seven UK business software companies under a single brand to form a supplier dedicated to meeting the requirements of mid-sized organisations. The company operates from offices in Manchester, London, Loughborough, Dublin and Glasgow and has a 25-year pedigree of supplying innovative IT solutions in a variety of vertical markets including distribution, not-for-profit and professional services.

m-hance’s new unified senior management team comprises Mark Thompson (CEO), Andrew Hayward (Managing Director), Tom Behan (Finance Director), Claire Carter (Marketing Director), Tony Hewitt (Operations Director), Amanda Grant (Market Development Director) and Lucy Mediratta (HR Manager).

A CAST of Millions? What nasty IT costs are hidden at YOUR company?

Results of the new CAST Report on Application Software Health (CRASH) released today by CAST, the world leader in software analysis and measurement, reveals businesses are exposed to millions of dollars to fix technical debt – the cost to fix hidden problems that remain damaging risks in applications after they are operational – yet they are not budgeting for these costs.

“The number of software glitches, outages and security breaches reported in the press this year, and the damage they have done to the reputations of organizations like Toyota, Sony and RIM, not to mention the U.S. Government and a multitude of banks and stock exchanges around the world, have made problems with structural quality in application software a boardroom issue,” said Dr. Bill Curtis, CAST’s chief scientist, senior vice president of the CAST Research Labs and director of the Consortium for IT Software Quality.

“The purpose of the 2011 Worldwide Applications Software Quality Study is to provide an objective, empirical foundation for discussing the structural quality of IT applications and the extent to which they suffer from structural flaws. What we found were numerous problems that should have been addressed prior to deployment. It’s little different from ignoring termites that are destroying the structure of your home.”

The study is the largest ever conducted and used automated analysis to measure the structural quality of 365 million lines of code within 745 IT applications used by 160 companies throughout 10 industries. Five application software “health factors” were examined in determining structural soundness: security, performance, robustness (i.e., uptime) and the ease of software transferability and changeability. Using data drawn from the automated structural analysis, CAST made a conservative estimate of what should be fixed, focusing only on those issues critical to business cost and risk.

“Our findings, although conservative, revealed an average technical debt of $3.61 per line of code,” said Curtis. “A significant number of applications examined in the study – nearly 15% – had over a million lines of code which means even the smallest of those contains over $3.6 million in technical debt.”

"The pace of application development, innovation and modernization is increasing exponentially, based on Agile practices, Cloud, Consumerization, Mobile," said David Norton, an analyst at Gartner. "With every release cycle we run the very real risk of adding Technical Debt that we must pay back, it’s just a question of when. This is the ticking time bomb for the 21st century.”

Curtis explained that over one-third (35%) of the violations discovered in the study result in damage to business by adversely affecting the security, performance and uptime of application software.

“That means that while two-thirds of the violations found were destined to have a dramatic effect on IT costs and a company’s bottom line, the other one-third is even more critical as it has a direct negative impact on business performance.” said Curtis. “Technical debt creates a double dose of trouble because it siphons money from IT innovation to pay for software repairs. The consequence is fewer dollars left to develop new applications capable of providing a competitive edge to an organization and increased risk embedded in the new applications designed to create that edge. It certainly makes technical debt something that should be critically important to both CIOs and CEOs.”

Some of the more surprising findings in the study included the discovery that government applications carried 50% more technical debt than the private sector. “There are many plausible explanations for these results,” Curtis said, “Such as multiple contractors working on different parts of an application, and contractual disincentives for delivering high quality software. There definitely needs to be better software acquisition practices and management.”

Other notable findings from the study included:

· Despite assumptions to the contrary, outsourced and in-house developed applications didn’t show any difference in structure quality. The same was true for onshore and offshore applications.

· Java EE applications were the most prevalent among those studied and received significantly lower performance scores as well as carrying greater technical debt than other languages

· Established development methods such as agile and waterfall scored significantly better in structural quality than custom methods, while waterfall scored the highest in transferability and changeability.

· COBOL applications scored the highest in security, while .NET applications received the lowest security scores

To obtain the Executive Summary of the 2011 CRASH Study visit CAST Research Labs at http://research.castsoftware.com.

FACTFILE:

CAST is a pioneer and world leader in Software Analysis and Measurement, with unique technology resulting from more than $90 million in R&D investment. CAST provides IT and business executives with precise analytics and automated software measurement to transform application development into a management discipline. More than 650 companies across all industry sectors and geographies rely on CAST to prevent business disruption while reducing hard IT costs.

CAST is an integral part of software delivery and maintenance at the world's leading IT service providers such as IBM and Capgemini.

Founded in 1990, CAST is listed on NYSE-Euronext (Euronext: CAS) and serves IT intensive enterprises worldwide with a network of offices in North America, Europe and India. For more information, visit www.castsoftware.com.

Web site: castsoftware.com
Blog: blog.castsoftware.com
Twittter: Twitter.com/OnQuality

Micro-business beats software giants in customer satisfaction

The Payroll Site, a family business employing just four people, has won the Software Satisfaction Award for SME Payroll Software. They were up against some much larger companies, including IRIS Software and Sage UK, who won the award in 2010.

Managing Director Steven Tucker was presented the award by Alastair Campbell, who compered the ceremony at the Marriott Hotel Grosvenor Square on 18 October.

The winner was chosen by a survey of customers using the 15 products in the payroll category. Most were traditional software packages, but The Payroll Site beat the competition with their innovative online payroll system.

Steven said, "Sometimes, being small can be an advantage, especially where customer satisfaction is concerned."

Over 10,000 customer surveys were completed across all 14 categories, with nearly a quarter falling within the SME payroll category. Steven said, "Based on previous years, we expected about 500 surveys in each category, but we were out by a factor of 5. It's a good job we have lots of happy customers, who kindly took time the time to complete the survey."

Steven's brother Kenny (who is Technical Director) said, "I love running a small business, and we're all really proud of the award. I'm going to put up a new shelf in the office, just for the trophy. I'll make it big enough for next year's award, just in case."

More information about The Payroll Site and the awards can be found on their websites www.thepayrollsite.co.uk and www.softwaresatisfaction.co.uk.