Being a computer engineer

Some time ago, at work, seeing me disappointed for what was happening, people asked me what I like most: do you like coding? My answer is:

No I don’t, I like engineering.

For me computer engineering is not coding, is not designing, is not system administration. It’s all of them.

Computer engineering means building a product: design, coding, deploying are all part of it. So I enjoy do these things because I like to think about a product and then ship it, I like all these things when they are together, not alone.

Building a product starts with thinking about what you want to do, what the customer wants. If the customer really said to you what he wants, if he is missing something, if you can give to him something he doesn’t expect but he’ll like more.

When you know what your product will be, you have to design and build it. Which piece of software you need, which ones you need to code by yourself, which kind of infrastructure you need to deploy it. Then you can start to code. Probably you forget something, so you have to iterate again on previous step to correct some mistakes.

When you finish your work, it’s the time to put it in production, and look for what your customer thinks about it.

If your customer is happy of the results, you have done a good job!