i, prash

On June 29th, 1998 I reported to Infosys Technologies in Bangalore’s Electronics City. It was the first day of my career as a Software Professional and nothing could have prepared me for the wild ride it’s been so far.

10 years, four employers, numerous clients, a software boom, a software bust, a little bit of Microsoft-hating, Java-loving, Microsoft-loving, Java-hating, Ruby-On-Rails-loving … if you think Software Engineering is just all about riding the next big wave (until the next big wave comes along), then you think right.

Meanwhile the more things change, the more they truly remain the same. My application server still spits out stack-traces expecting me to understand hundreds of lines of exceptions to figure out why it failed when it should have told me in plain English. Software still fails to work when you most expect it to (and worse, it sometimes works when you are confident it shouldn’t). Service-Oriented-Architecture, or SOA, is DOA. Amazon is still the only company that understands website-usability.

And, oh, real flesh-and-blood people are still needed to write software. Guess I’ll be shifting 0s and 1s around just a little while longer!

     

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 19:21 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.