Why am I starting this Medium Channel

Hi,

My name is Samuel Path and I’m currently a software engineer at a SaaS company called Esker and based in Lyon, France.

Even though I’ve majored in Computer Science for my Master’s Degree and did two internships as a software developer, I was never really interested in development.

During my coursework, I merely did the minimum to get correct grades. My aim was to simply get the degree, since my university was pretty prestigious in France and I knew it would open the doors to many good consulting jobs (my aim was to work for companies such as Accenture, Atos or Capgemini).

Upon graduation, I finally decided to work as a technical support engineer for a SaaS company, since this would allow me to grow a lot of soft skills that would be useful for any kind of job or career (communication, team work, etc.).

After a year and a half, my team elected me as the team’s Scrum Master. My role would be to maximise the team’s efficiency and remove any obstacle to their full potential. It was actually a job involving a lot of management, albeit much more based on influence than on authority. I was involved in a lot of planning, hiring, firing, meeting leading, etc.

After 6 months in this role that really fit my personality, I realized that any Business School grad with a love for technology could do my job. Even though my job title said: “Engineer”, I wasn’t actually doing any kind of proper engineering.

And I really started missing this engineering aspect, which was actually the main reason why I wanted to go into Computer Science in the first place…

I thus started to devote 10 hours a week on my own time to get back to code, with the hope to be able to pass my company’s technical tests to become a software engineer. These tests are challenging: only 3% of applicants are hired. So I knew I had a lot of work on my plate.

After 6 months of study, I was able to successfully pass the tests, and I will start working as a software engineer beginning of 2017.

At the beginning of my code journey, my focus was mainly on getting a hand on web technologies (HTML, CSS & JS). I then shifted to more server-oriented languages like C# and C++. During the last months of self-study, I realized more and more that being a good software engineer was more about structure, clarity and good & disciplined engineering principles than about the latest tools and techniques. My focus started to shift from following the guys with the latests JS tricks to following the respected experts in our field (like Uncle Bob and Dave Thomas).

So what am I going to talk about in this channel? Here are a few things:

• My transition from a management role to a software development role
• The tools I found useful to be able to reach a sufficient level to pass the technical test in my company
• The resources I currently enjoy to develop my skills
• As I mature as a developer, I want to write more and more about clean coding practices

I’m new into this writing gig. So in order to get good at it over the months, I’m pledging to write one post a week.

I expect my first posts to be pretty basic, but hope to move up gears as time goes by.

Thanks for reading up to this point, and for joining me in this writing journey.

Originally published at www.samuelpath.com on December 27, 2016.