I've never had a good answer for "why I'm in software engineering."
It's like asking why breathing is awesome.
In 1994 I found Geocities, Perl and Javascript. These combined, was a dopamine hit of instant creation. I built for fun. Then for money. In 1997 I built a public comment board for my high school class. Everyone used it to talk shit. I shut it down. Zuckerberg made different choices...
Then bots. Then Flash apps back when that was a thing. I picked up whatever language the problem needed from QBasic to Pascal to PHP to Ruby to Objective-C, because the language was never the point. The creation was the point.
Same with deployment. FTP to CI/CD. Servers in my living room behind a DMZ because I wanted to understand how it all worked. The beautiful Kafka message streaming in the cloud to 15+ microservices for data consistency.
I also have run a dev shop and shipped products for clients. I have built my own startup, raised money, and saw it through an exit, and it’s still available today nationwide. I’ve also accidentally configured a load balancer so wrong that every user spun up their own EC2 instance. That was an expensive lesson in reading documentation. Stateful infrastructure IS a huge mistake too. Lots of fun stories, especially around 2010.
The obsession isn't just building, it's also the ideas.
I've gone down every engineering rabbit hole. CAP theorem. DDD. Microservices. BFF. CQRS. Kong Gateways. Command Bus. I've drawn hexagonal architecture diagrams for people who didn't ask. Implemented all of it, debated all of it, mass-forgot half of it. But the longer I do this, the more I come back to the solution that doesn't need a whiteboard to explain.
The thing I figured out at age 13 staring at a CRT monitor is still true: I just like building things.
It's not just software. I was taking apart broken lawn mower engines in 7th grade, and getting them to work. I built a 454 big block with a friend in '96 and also with my son in 2010. I'm still building them. Legos too, I never play with them, I just build.
Fifteen years leading engineering teams, never chasing titles, just responsibilities that let me help others build with over 25+ years building software.
I'm a builder.
That's the whole answer.
❤️
Jake
https://lnkd.in/g8hGZXrM
-- What I'm building now, this large volume of users is new to me. The nationwide smiles created are quantifiable. Build build build build build build and grow.